But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.
Unfortunately none of those numbers are really even close to correct (the discussion is always fun, but the folks in r/datahoarder are often not correctly informed. textfiles has more patience for it than I do). It would probably cost around 1.5M in drives, even at reasonable current enterprise volume pricing, to back up the 60+ PB of unique data in the Internet Archive (plus, as someone does note in that thread, the cost of running them -- even if it were a static backup to cold disks, you still need chassis to run them in for the backup process, space and infra for them, electricity, people, &c). I don't know offhand how much space the contents of the Wayback currently take up, but it's definitely an order of magnitude more than that number as well.
This is the kind of radical demonstration I expect out of some fly-by-night startup, not a twenty-four year old nonprofit with less annual revenue than the lawyers who're suing them.
Can you ping me by email?