Amazon is Killing Amazon Drive

You probably forgot that Amazon once offered a OneDrive competitor, but the service, called Amazon Drive, is ending next year so that Amazon can focus its consumer cloud storage offerings on photos and personal videos.

“Over the last 11 years, Amazon Drive has served as a secure cloud storage service for Amazon customers to back up their files,” an Amazon email to customers notes. “On December 31, 2023, we will no longer support Amazon Drive to more fully focus our efforts on photos and video storage with Amazon Photos. We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with Amazon Photos.”

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Customers who still use Amazon Drive—which I believe was once called Amazon Cloud Drive, based on this 2015 write-up—will need to download their files from the Amazon Drive website before December 31, 2023. The service will work normally until January 31, 2023, at which point customers will be able to view existing files but not upload new files.

Amazon notes that customers can continue to use Amazon Photos to back up and store their personal photos and videos. Apps are available for iOS, Android, and Desktop, and Amazon Prime members get free, unlimited full-resolution photo storage and 5 GB of video storage. (Non-Prime members get 5 GB of free storage for photos and videos.)

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Conversation 11 comments

  • christianwilson

    Premium Member
    29 July, 2022 - 10:11 am

    <p>I toy with Amazon Drive occasionally. I always wanted to make it part of my workflow but it never fit in right. </p><p><br></p><p>I think Amazon would have had more success with this product if they had a platform to leverage it. A productivity suite to rival Google Docs and Microsoft Office or an end-user OS that integrated Amazon Drive (aside from consumption focused Fire tablets). Without that, there was never an incentive to use it. </p>

    • solomonrex

      29 July, 2022 - 12:39 pm

      <p>Oh, but they had that great fire tablet with bundled keyboard, so productive really.</p>

    • camelot5

      29 July, 2022 - 2:36 pm

      <p>Same…I couldn’t really see a need for it. If you’re in Google’s world, you’re going to use Google Drive. If you’re in Microsoft’s world, you’re going to use OneDrive. I’ve not heard of any businesses using Amazon Drive- so it makes sense they’re killing it. I’m almost thinking the same about Dropbox…and kind of surprised it’s lasted this long too.</p>

  • ianceicys

    Premium Member
    29 July, 2022 - 10:17 am

    <p>I have over 24 TB backed up to Amazon Drive as I knew it was backed by S3 and I consolidated all of my old hard drives about 5 years back. </p><p>I also paid thousands of dollars a year for the service.</p><p><br></p><p>I’m paranoid about losing my files, so I also have the same 24 TB backed up to OneDrive, and the same 24 TB backed up to Google.</p><p><br></p><p>Now I have to download everything and move it to S3 Cold storage. What a hassle. </p><p><br></p><p>I guess I’ll save money, but Amazon I can’t trust their consumer offerings.</p>

    • IanYates82

      Premium Member
      29 July, 2022 - 5:26 pm

      <p>I have done similar with my HDDs but currently they’re on a NAS</p><p>I’m wanting to put them on some cloud services. How did you get 24TB of space on OneDrive? </p>

    • mikeh

      Premium Member
      29 July, 2022 - 10:01 pm

      <p>Why would spend the time to down load it from Amazon if you have it in backed up to OneDrive and to Google. If you have in two places and you need a third then just do a cloud transfer to another service from one of your current three back up locations. I think you could possibly have Amazon transfer it to a couple of drives and send you the drives for a fee. I hope you don’t have to spend too much time on this. Best of luck to you! </p>

    • stewrogers

      30 July, 2022 - 3:11 am

      <p>Why? Do you not already risk the data falling out of sync and having versioning issues? If you are that paranoid and clearly not short of cash, why don’t you rent some rack space in a dc and mild you own storage cloud, or just run a NAS in the house to replicate one of the other 2 instances of your data?</p>

      • stewrogers

        30 July, 2022 - 3:15 am

        <p>*build your own storage cloud. Fat fingers and autocorrect….</p>

  • JH_Radio

    Premium Member
    29 July, 2022 - 5:23 pm

    <p>24TB? how exactly does one get 24TB of storage anywhere ?</p><p>I didn’t think you could purchase that much from Google or Microsoft?</p><p>Thanks,</p><p>John</p>

  • cuppettcj

    29 July, 2022 - 9:54 pm

    <p>I only use Amazon Drive for photo storage. As long as they continue to offer unlimited full-resolution photo storage for Prime members then this won’t affect my usage.</p>

  • markbyrn

    Premium Member
    31 July, 2022 - 12:25 am

    <p>Maybe if Amazon Prime included extra cloud drive storage (not just unlimited photo storage), people might have been more inclined to use it. </p>

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