Let's assume that with Glacier you can retrieve your 1000 GB in 4 hours instead of 3 days.

You will be surprised by a retrieval fee of 1000 / 4 * 720 * 0.01 = $1,800.

If you want to get your 1000 GB for free, you'd have to request no more than 69 MB per hour. It will take you about 20 months to get your data!

With Glacier, limit retrievals to less than 5% per month / 30 days / 24 hours = 0.007% of total data stored per hour to avoid these ugly surprises.

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retr...

For many people waiting 3 days is more attractive than paying the ~$1000 that it would cost to retrieve it in one day from Glacier.

For disaster recovery 3 days might mean the end of your business.

For disaster recovery $1000 is peanuts, that's a company thing, GP mentioned 'people', not companies, different use-case.

I wrote a backup program that uses Glacier, and the retrieval policies are nearly impossible to manage and explain. But the thing I really don't get is that you can use Amazon Import to read a hard drive into Glacier, but you can't use Amazon Export to get a drive full of data back out. You can with S3.

In a disaster situation, a company is going to want hard drives sent to them next day. As others have mentioned, this isn't a money thing, it's a time issue. But it isn't available with Glacier (probably not with Google either...)

If you're willing to pay more for faster retrieval I guess you could store e.g. 5TB of random data to get a fast "base speed"- cutting those 3 days down to 12 hours.

Or use Nearline for archival data as well as disaster recovery. You won't need to transfer the archival data for normal disaster recovery scenarios, so it'll be -- for that scenario -- extra data that boosts your speed, but it's still, on its own, a useful use of the service.

That would be more expensive than just storing 1TB with the normal, full speed Cloud Storage service.