By my calculation using what I can find of 2019 pricing, a more reasonable solution would have been:
Synology RackStation RS1219+ - $1,200
8x Ironwolf Pro 12TB drives - 8x $450 = $3600
so for a usable RAID-6 capacity of 65TB about $4800 + OSS, or double that if they have two locations they could and replicate between them.
I know there would be cheaper hardware options available (I'm partial to older surplus enterprise hardware myself) but it isn't particularly reasonable to expect a small business to choose a more DIY (at least in terms of software configuration) option. You could step down to 10TB drives, but it seems unlikely they would have wanted to risk that not being quite enough.
On top of that, since 2019 is 7 years ago, it is reasonable to expect they would have had a hardware refresh at some point, I would think 5 years would be more reasonable than 3 year for something like this. At that point, the nas would be more ($1300) but the drives would be less (8 * $300), so add either another $3700 (double if both are replaced, but maybe they figured the offsite backup could be stretched even longer than 5 years)
So, rather than $2500, it would probably have been more like $8500 + OSS or $13,300 without OSS. Still that would have meant a proper are archive and a proper backup and they wouldn't be in this mess, so I completely agree with you about what they should have done, but think you were underselling the price a good bit.
By my calculation using what I can find of 2019 pricing, a more reasonable solution would have been: Synology RackStation RS1219+ - $1,200 8x Ironwolf Pro 12TB drives - 8x $450 = $3600 so for a usable RAID-6 capacity of 65TB about $4800 + OSS, or double that if they have two locations they could and replicate between them.
I know there would be cheaper hardware options available (I'm partial to older surplus enterprise hardware myself) but it isn't particularly reasonable to expect a small business to choose a more DIY (at least in terms of software configuration) option. You could step down to 10TB drives, but it seems unlikely they would have wanted to risk that not being quite enough.
On top of that, since 2019 is 7 years ago, it is reasonable to expect they would have had a hardware refresh at some point, I would think 5 years would be more reasonable than 3 year for something like this. At that point, the nas would be more ($1300) but the drives would be less (8 * $300), so add either another $3700 (double if both are replaced, but maybe they figured the offsite backup could be stretched even longer than 5 years)
So, rather than $2500, it would probably have been more like $8500 + OSS or $13,300 without OSS. Still that would have meant a proper are archive and a proper backup and they wouldn't be in this mess, so I completely agree with you about what they should have done, but think you were underselling the price a good bit.