[cmurf]

The Amazon pricing is sufficiently cheap it probably comes with caveats similar to Glacier. Rather than as convoluted as Glacier they probably just have fixed retrieval amounts and rates, rather than the "get more or faster, pay more" Glacier sliding scale. Whereas Google is probably their nearline service. I have no idea what Microsoft's is. Backblaze also has $0.005/GB/mo which puts it in the $60/year for 1TB range using B2 Cloud service, but it's more like Google Nearline I think.

All of these have different retrieval rules and rates, so it's not just the annual.

[Veratyr]

Many home users have managed to saturate their (unusually fast) connections sending/receiving to Amazon Cloud Drive: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/32oniv/so_how_...

And it doesn't have Glacier-like restrictions, at least in terms of retrieval delay. Nor does Backblaze. The difference with Backblaze is that it's only replicated within a single datacenter. If anything happens to that DC you're out of luck.

[mahyarm]

The typical pattern for photo users will be a large amount of upload at the start as they upload their collection, then occasional browsing of photos on the amazon website, which will be mostly smaller thumbnails. Rarely once in awhile users will request large originals. You will have an even smaller amount of people download their entire collection of originals.

With these patterns, you can make a system that puts everything on S3 at first, makes thumbnails and starts moving most things to glacier based on access patterns.

[Veratyr]

Such a system would be wonderful, particularly if it used Backblaze B2 or Google Nearline instead of Glacier (to get around the hours of delay).

Unfortunately, no such system yet exists and the complexities of dealing with many people's libraries (particularly regarding RAW files) make it more difficult than it seems (I've looked at doing this myself in the past).