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.
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.
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.