Tape storage is still the most optimal form of long-term storage. If you need to store things for an exceptionally long time, such as financial data, scientific data, etc, then you're going to get the most bang for your buck on tape.
What usecase could the price delta make sense to have a 4 hour feedback loop and all of your important data locked in someone elses data center.
the usecase where your data is so properly massive that this makes sense && you don't have the storage infrastructure in place, is so narrow that it doesnt make sense.
It is basically one research student's crawl data
Edit: also, s3 is pretty cheap. So again, i dont really see the usecase here. How much room is in the market between your own physical or digital system and amazon s3 or an equivalent. you would have to have a massive amount of data you dont care about and be very price sensitive.
The data I care about is already backed up on two different multi-TB drives at home, and another one at work.
Glacier is the contingency for "something took out the original data and all three backups in two different locations 7 or 8km apart - if I'm still alive after whatever just happened, I'll consider whether or not to pay Amazon a grand or so to retrieve it quickly from Glacier, or wait ~20 months to get it all for single-digit-dollars".
That gives you 2 backup providers that can durably store everything and it's free and quick to access. Why deal with all the harddrives and glacier?
I believe there are other similar services for Linux or you can just use browser to upload files with Amazon.
You don't have to pay $150 for retrieval of 60GB. And you don't do long-term storage for X TB / 5 TB * $150. You might have to rent space in someone elses datacenter to put your own external backup... or you could pay Amazon for Glacier and not deal with maintenance etc. Might be worth it even if you have infrastructure for all data that isn't glacier-cold.
So you trust Glacier or Google Nearline (or any similar provider) without testing? No testing ever???
I wouldn't feel happy with my critical data floating around in the cloud, without my checking it at least once a year to make sure it really exists.
And once you do start verifying that data, you will incur all sorts of charges to access it.
This allows you to trivially share, copy, move and retrieve that data quickly as well as fully control who has access and when.
I am sure there are use cases for this but in a situation where you have petabyte scale data, it is often the case that you also have the infrastructure to save it. How many places would need to store >5tb of data a week that
* don't have this capability in house
* will almost never need to access it again.
* will not need it in a timely manner, if they do need to access it again.
* don't have the money to implement their dedicated server and storage on site for this purpose.
I am not saying that this rules everyone out, but the prices are so low, and tape must be so annoying, I couldn't imagine why they keep offering this. Obviously, some peopel must be using it but in 2016 with storage prices being so low already, i don't know how many places have this amount of data and meet the above requirements.