I know a lot of people seem to have jumped on the backup options of Glacier here and, whilst there is some potential for home users to make use of this product for back, that is not what Glacier is intended for.
Glacier is an archive product. It's for data you don't really see yourself ever needing to access in the general course of business ever again.
If you're a company and you have lots of invoice/purchase transactional information that's 2+ years old that you never use for anything, but you still have to keep it for 5 - 10 years for compliance reasons, Glacier is the perfect product for you.
Even its pricing is designed to take into account that the average use case is to only access small portions of the total archive store at a reasonable price (5% prorated for free in the pricing page).
For many users, though - they will never use the restore capability. And for those who do, with Backblaze, they'll usually get a FedEx of a Hard Drive - so Recovery time is measured in about a day or so. I wouldn't downplay the consumer backup/restore angle so quickly - for many (most?) consumers, the ability to restore rapidly is balanced by their desire to have low monthly payments. I think we're going to see a lot of consumer backup applications built on top of Glacier in the next several months that will be competing with (the already excellent) backblaze and friends. (Note - Backblaze has excellent real-time restore, with date versioning, for those of us who use it as an online data recovery tool as well)
Glacier is an archive product. It's for data you don't really see yourself ever needing to access in the general course of business ever again.
If you're a company and you have lots of invoice/purchase transactional information that's 2+ years old that you never use for anything, but you still have to keep it for 5 - 10 years for compliance reasons, Glacier is the perfect product for you.
Even its pricing is designed to take into account that the average use case is to only access small portions of the total archive store at a reasonable price (5% prorated for free in the pricing page).