Agreed. Let me add that a lot of us are living under severe data cap or overage regimes, for me and my parents it's 2 AT&T plain DSL lines, each with 150 GB/month free, go over that 2-3 times and you start paying $10/50 GB/month on a line.
So uploading as well as downloading would have to be throttled. But this sounds like a superb way to store all those pictures and movies of the grandchildren, especially for those who don't have a son with a LTO drive ^_^. All the other alternatives are lousy or a lot more expensive.
Really? Why? If you have say 10 years of home pictures/movies, and you know they are 100% safe in Amazon Glacier, why do you need them all on your new computer as fast as possible? I don't understand why its such a rush.
If it's a rush, you pay the fee. If you can afford to wait a month or two or three to get all the data back for free, you trickle your pics/movies back to your new computer one day at a time.
It seems Amazon charges by the peak hour, so if you can throttle your retrieval so that it takes 3 or 4 days to get the data back, the fee would be a lot less.
A 5 GB per hour download would cost $36 for the month. You could download your entire 3TB files in less than a month for $36. So I don't think that's a crazy fee when your computer was destroyed by a fire...
To get your data back in a week requires 17GB per hour, which is $128. Not unreasonable either considering the urgency and the circumstances.