Straight after Amazon raised prices for its Prime service over the summer, the next bit of unpleasant news came. At the end of January, Amazon Drive cloud storage will be discontinued.
Amazon is not just an online mail order company anymore. In addition to a huge range, the company now offers a streaming and music service, e-books and magazines, and more. So far, cloud Amazon Drive has also been part of the portfolio, thanks to many an insider tip when it comes to online data backup. This should change in future.
Amazon Drive is being discontinued
According to official announcement Amazon will be stamping the Drive service in the near future. This applies to both the limited, free version and the unlimited version integrated into Prime. From January 31, 2023, it will not be possible to upload data to the cloud. However, files already stored there can still be accessed until December 31, 2023. Since then, Amazon Drive users have had to look for an alternative. App users should also note that access will not be possible from October 31, 2023.
As to why, Amazon said: “We are taking this opportunity to focus more of our efforts on Amazon Photos to provide customers with a dedicated solution for storing photos and videos.” Related cloud service Amazon Photos is accordingly not part of the affected measurement.
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What happens to the stored data?
Even after setting, the stored data is not completely destroyed. Anyone who hasn’t already looked for an alternative and deleted their Amazon Drive account will at least automatically find the archived photos and videos on Amazon Photos. However, all other data will be deleted after a clear notice by Amazon.
Incidentally, the Amazon Photos service is also available in a paid and free version. However, the latter is limited to 5 GB of storage space. On the other hand, Prime members have unlimited photo storage and only video storage space is also capped at 5GB. From EUR 19.99 per year, you can increase storage space on Amazon Photos step-by-step, with and without a Prime subscription. The most comprehensive package has space for about 30 TB for photos and about 4200 hours of video content in 1080p HD, but costs 2999.70 euros per year.
Read also: Best Free Cloud Alternatives to Google Photos
Amazon Drive Alternatives
Although the final shutdown is still a few months away, users should try to find an alternative to Amazon Drive as soon as possible. If you only save photos and videos in the cloud, you can certainly switch to Amazon Photos, as mentioned. But those who prefer to archive other file types should slowly start paying attention to the competition.
For example, Apple’s iCloud Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive also offer 5GB of free storage, Google Drive offers 15GB, while Dropbox offers 2GB. With all of the providers mentioned, you can also book different amounts of storage into subscriptions.
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