Amazon is killing Drive cloud storage to focus on Photos

[Shawn Knight]

What just happened? Amazon is doing away with Drive, the cloud storage service it launched over a decade ago. In a statement e-mailed to Amazon Drive customers, the e-commerce giant said it will stop supporting the service at the end of next year in order to focus its efforts on photo and video storage through Amazon Photos.

Drive arrived in 2011 as Cloud Drive, a service the company billed as a hard drive in the cloud to store music, pictures, videos, documents and more. It debuted with 5GB of complimentary space, and MP3s purchased from Amazon didn't count towards a user's quota.

In 2015, Amazon rolled out an unlimited storage tier priced at $60 per year and an unlimited package just for photos that sold for $12 annually. The unlimited photos plan was only for non-Prime members; those with a paid Prime membership already had access to unfettered image storage through Prime Photos.

Amazon dropped the unlimited plan in mid-2017 and replaced it with two paid tiers. The first afforded 100GB of storage for $12 per year while the other granted 1TB for the same $60 / year as the outgoing unlimited package. Nowadays, Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage, 5GB of space for videos and free shipping on prints as part of Prime.

Existing Amazon Drive users should note that there's still plenty of time to act. According to this FAQ, the Amazon Drive app for Android and iOS will remain in their respective app stores until October 31, 2022. The service will still work normally until January 31, 2023. At that time, Amazon will disable new file uploads but customers will still be able to view existing files.

The official end date for Drive is set for December 31, 2023. After this date, customers will no longer have access to files stored on Drive.

Related Reading: Check your backup storage and strategy

It's also worth mentioning that photos and videos in Amazon Drive have been automatically saved to Amazon Photos. "After December 31, 2023 you can continue using Amazon Photos to access your photos and videos," the FAQ reads.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/95469-amazon-killing-drive-cloud-storage-service-focus-photos.html

 

[ZackL04]

Quick question to someone that knows more than I.

What type of drive should I be buying to backup my own files locally?

Is there a brand or type I should be pursuing

 

[dualkelly]

Quick question to someone that knows more than I.

What type of drive should I be buying to backup my own files locally?

Is there a brand or type I should be pursuing

depends on how much stuff you have to backup? technically you should have two backups. You can get external hard drives that are usb powered ie laptop hard drives that are encased in plastic they are good up to 4 TB or maybe 5TB you can also get SSDs this way for quick copy speed. If you need more space however its far easier to get a external dock and just by a regular internal hard drive. Hard drive space is up to 20TB I think one of the manufacturer have a 24tb out for enterprise.

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

I hope the reduce the price since they’re downgrading this to a photos-only cloud service.

 

[ET3D]

What type of drive should I be buying to backup my own files locally?

Depends on the length of time and amount of work. I recently researched this, and the only media that's supposed to last a very long time are Blu-ray M-Discs. They're supposed to last hundreds of years. You'd need to pay for drives and media.

Everything else is likely to develop errors within a few years. Of course if you're willing to do a bit of work every couple of years that shouldn't be a serious problem.

 

[ZackL04]

Depends on the length of time and amount of work. I recently researched this, and the only media that's supposed to last a very long time are Blu-ray M-Discs. They're supposed to last hundreds of years. You'd need to pay for drives and media.

Everything else is likely to develop errors within a few years. Of course if you're willing to do a bit of work every couple of years that shouldn't be a serious problem.

Exactly, there is no fail safe. And these blu-ray m disk could be un-readable in the future due to hardware….
Ugh

 

[ZackL04]

depends on how much stuff you have to backup? technically you should have two backups. You can get external hard drives that are usb powered ie laptop hard drives that are encased in plastic they are good up to 4 TB or maybe 5TB you can also get SSDs this way for quick copy speed. If you need more space however its far easier to get a external dock and just by a regular internal hard drive. Hard drive space is up to 20TB I think one of the manufacturer have a 24tb out for enterprise.

I understand that. But is there a specific brand oe model that should last longer?

something like a samsung ssd with 10yr warranty?

 

[ET3D]

I understand that. But is there a specific brand oe model that should last longer?

something like a samsung ssd with 10yr warranty?

As I understand it, an SSD will retain data as long as you occasionally power it up, though I don't really know if that's the case. If you just keep an SSD stored, it will lose its data over time. If you store it at a reasonable temperature, I think that 1 year is guaranteed for consumer drives. The more bits per cell, the more likely that data will be lost, so QLC drives are likely to lose data faster than TLC, for example.

Warranty doesn't cover data loss, and is about not developing errors for normal use, and archiving isn't normal use.

I've seen some people say that hard drive should retain data when stored, but I've read in other places that this also isn't guaranteed beyond 3-5 years, and it's best to refresh the data.

Which is why I said in my previous post that you'd need to do some work every couple of years for pretty much every media except M-disc, where you only have to make sure that you have a Blu-ray drive to read it.

 

[ZackL04]

As I understand it, an SSD will retain data as long as you occasionally power it up, though I don't really know if that's the case. If you just keep an SSD stored, it will lose its data over time. If you store it at a reasonable temperature, I think that 1 year is guaranteed for consumer drives. The more bits per cell, the more likely that data will be lost, so QLC drives are likely to lose data faster than TLC, for example.

Warranty doesn't cover data loss, and is about not developing errors for normal use, and archiving isn't normal use.

I've seen some people say that hard drive should retain data when stored, but I've read in other places that this also isn't guaranteed beyond 3-5 years, and it's best to refresh the data.

Which is why I said in my previous post that you'd need to do some work every couple of years for pretty much every media except M-disc, where you only have to make sure that you have a Blu-ray drive to read it.

Damn, thanks