glacier

It has not even a fraction of the momentum of the glacier, but it can drill holes in you.

Unless you're using S3 with Reduced Redundancy then you're not going to lose any files, so Glacier seems pointless.

A glacier accumulates mass, principally from snowfall in winter, which compacts into ice and flows downhill.

Both Google's nearline storage and Glacier scale your retrieval capabilities proportionally to how much data you have stored with them.

Meanwhile GCS Nearline and Amazon Glacier (also offsite backup products) are at 1c/GB and even their regular storage is at ~3c.

If I were warehousing petabytes of never-to-be-needed data, the price difference over Glacier would be hard to ignore.

The simplest way to look at a glacier's changes over time is mass balance.

Helens' glaciers disappeared following the eruption, the glacier(s) will start to regrow as snowfall causes ice accumulation above the equilibrium line altitude.

It losses mass through what's called ablation - for a typical mountain glacier this is principally surface melt in summer, or for a glacier in polar regions it may be ice calving into the sea.

Eventually, as the articles hints, the glacier will come back* into mass balance.

It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded.

You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to solve then it doesn't look so bad: 1.

In comparison, Amazon Glacier states that it "is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive."

In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred "jokingly to as Write Only Storage".

A glacier can level mountains, but anyone can stand next it it and let it "hit" them with no damage.

(That's the definition of a glacier, as opposed to a snowfield.) There is type of glacier called a "rock glacier" that appears on its surface to be a talus field, but it flows like a glacier.

Sorry to go off topic, but why would you want to simultaneously backup to S3 and Glacier?

Glacier seems like the more appropriate choice here, but obviously doesn't make Nearline look as good.

And the price (not taking into account retrieval costs, etc...) of 1 cent per gigagbyte-month is the same as Glacier's.