I don't get the impression Glacier is right for any home user. The pricing scheme is just too weird, and there are weird delays and time limits involved. I believe you have 24 hours to retrieve your data before incurring more fees when you do a retrieval from Glacier--but if I store a backup of 150 GB of photos and music and fetch the whole thing, I'm not going to be able to get that from Amazon to my home computer in one day. Avoiding that problem will necessitate other expenditures.
In order to avoid the retrieval costs you'll have to limit retrievals to a small fraction of what you have stored. In my example, if I lose all my photos and music I'm going to want to restore the whole thing. Ignoring the transfer problem above, you're looking at paying for transferring 95% of the archive, 142.5 GB. I find Glacier's pricing model so difficult to comprehend I couldn't even guess at what that would cost, but Colin's math shows that what looks like it should cost $0.02 (retrieving 2 GB once at $0.01 per GB) winds up costing $3.60 (peak rate, percentage of archive fetched, etc.), so I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for our use case of fetching the entire 150 GB archive.
As you say, this is certainly something businesses that need to archive lots of stuff may be able to use (if they can navigate the pricing structure) I just don't see a home user getting anything out of it but frustration and a confusing bill.
Assume I store 150 gigabytes of family photos. I pay $1.50 a month ($18 a year) for storage. Assume I've uploaded the files in 150 * 1 gigabyte archives.
I decide to retrieve it all. The 5% (6 gigabyte) retrieval allowance is negligible. The data transfer out fee at $0.120 per gigabyte will cost $18.
If I retrieve 150 * 1 gigabyte chunks every hour retrieval will take 1 hour; the peak hourly retrieval will be 150 gigabytes; the data rate will be 341 Mbps; and the retrieval fee will be 150720$0.01 = $1,080
If I retrieve 7 * 1 gigabyte chunks every hour retrieval will take 150/7~=22 hours; the data rate will be 15 Mbps; the peak hourly retrieval will be 7 gigabytes; and the retrieval fee will be 7 * 720 * $0.01 = $50.40
If I retrieve 1 * 1 gigabyte chunks every hour retrieval will take ~7 days; the data rate will be 2.2 Mbps; the peak hourly retrieval will be 1 gigabytes; and the retrieval fee will be 1 * 720 * $0.01 = $7.20
If I share an account with 20 other people with the same amount of data stored, the 5% allowance would be enough for my entire download; I could retrieve as quickly as I liked without incurring a retrieval fee. I would still pay the $18 data transfer out fee.
TLDR: Retrieval isn't as cheap as storage, but if you lost all your family photos, you'd probably be willing to pay it.
Indeed the pricing is difficult to estimate. I followed along with [1] in a spreadsheet to get a feel for it for my usage.
In my case I am looking at making a full backup of a 1TB usb disk. Doing a full restore on a 20Mbit/s (= 9 GB/hour) would probably take about 5 days. In that case I'll be paying $65 in retrieval fees for the full restore. (I'm hoping that includes bandwidth costs, that isn't clear to me from the FAQ).
$65 for a full restore seems reasonable for something I expect to never need to do.
You got a problem right away in that Glacier only keeps your files on the staging disk for 24 hours. Unless you're planning on doing your disk in a set of separate archives, you're going to run into issues. And if you do separate archives you have to worry about the $0.05/thousand requests problem.
You do still have to worry about bandwidth costs, $0.12 per GB, which adds another $120 to the cost of your restore: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/
I can't speak for you but restores that cost $185 and take 5 days sound like a losing backup strategy for me.
In order to avoid the retrieval costs you'll have to limit retrievals to a small fraction of what you have stored. In my example, if I lose all my photos and music I'm going to want to restore the whole thing. Ignoring the transfer problem above, you're looking at paying for transferring 95% of the archive, 142.5 GB. I find Glacier's pricing model so difficult to comprehend I couldn't even guess at what that would cost, but Colin's math shows that what looks like it should cost $0.02 (retrieving 2 GB once at $0.01 per GB) winds up costing $3.60 (peak rate, percentage of archive fetched, etc.), so I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for our use case of fetching the entire 150 GB archive.
As you say, this is certainly something businesses that need to archive lots of stuff may be able to use (if they can navigate the pricing structure) I just don't see a home user getting anything out of it but frustration and a confusing bill.