Actually, even in your use case, the cost of glacier (or some other service like http://bit-chest.com/ http://bit-chest.com/ ) is justified. However, you have t

Actually, even in your use case, the cost of glacier (or some other service like http://bit-chest.com/ http://bit-chest.com/ ) is justified. However, you have to see it as a kind of "fire insurance" for your files. Even if the total monetary cost, computing time and materials that you use to store the files yourself is probably a lot smaller than putting your files in Glacier, what you get from Glacier is that the files there are SAFE. Eleven nines safe. No worries about burning houses, earthquakes, storms, flooded data centres, just safe. Getting that degree of safety would be hard to do on your own, and probably push your costs into similar regions as the ones that Amazon offers.