Amazon is Shutting Down Its Cloud Storage Service Amazon Drive (geekwire.com) 29
Amazon sent emails out Friday morning to Amazon Drive users to notify them that the company is shutting down its cloud storage service on Dec. 31, 2023. From a report: "We are taking the opportunity to more fully focus our efforts on Amazon Photos to provide customers a dedicated solution for photos and video storage," Amazon says in an FAQ. Amazon says photos and videos in Amazon Drive accounts have been automatically saved to Amazon Photos. "If you rely on Amazon Drive for your file storage, you will need to go to the Amazon Drive website and download your files by December 31, 2023," Amazon noted.
Amazon had a cloud storage thihg? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Amazon had a cloud storage thihg? (Score:2)
Haha same
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Yep. First it was unlimted for $50 a year. Then it was 1tb for $50 year. Now this :(
Amazon Drive? what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Never heard of it - seriously, I didn't even know it existed.
I guess these kinds of "solutions" are ten-a-penny - so easy to miss them.
The same old caveat applies "Not your computer, not your data" - even if you pay for the service.
Use cloud storage at your own risk, if there's anything really valuable you want to keep, make sure YOU have "custody" over that data - that you have local storage AND multiple backup solutions in place.
The "cloud" should always been considered temporary throw-away storage.
Re:Amazon Drive? what? (Score:5, Insightful)
They literally own the S3 infrastructure and they couldn't be competitive enough for anyone to notice or care.
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I think it's more that people were using this to host there media downloads and stream from it.
Most of Amazons offerings are charged by usage but this one wasn't so it made it great for things like this.
I never got around to doing that (plus deciding what media was worth putting there was a challenge) and now I'm glad I didn't devote any time to it.
... and digital rights? - Oh Man! - minefield! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another scary aspect about putting your data onto cloud services - which really, does include photo sharing services like Flickr - is to have a damn good look at what their terms and conditions say!
You could find yourself, unwittingly, giving away rights to your own creations, simply by uploading them to a cloud service.
This kind of practice is rife - that "no such thing as a free lunch?" - yeah, that.
You get all of this free storage, but did you read the T's & C's? - did you note the bit about "company XYZ reserves the right to use your private data as they see fit"
No? - well, maybe because the legal language in those conditions was so much unreadable spaghetti, in clause 11.1.35, in 10 point size text, that it skipped your notice "Oh yeah, Terms and conditions, whatevs, tick tick, skip skip, all good!"
How about the fact that those T's & C's can also include a clause, that if you _delete_ your data from a cloud service, they reserve the right to still store it, for XYZ time? - that your digital "footprint" just stays - that any law agency can request access to any service you have used and haul up data you thought you had deleted? ... yeah, that...
Shall we go further? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm on a roll, I've had a few beers, let's go _beyond_ the original story, _beyond_ the idea of cloud storage.
Let's talk about _your_ digital footprint.
Mine? It's massive, I reckon - I've been naive or careless - both - whatevs, right?
I have a gmail account that is now 18 years old.
It is _still_ my primary email account.
It's massively useful to me, in that I can trawl through it, to find discussions I had with, say, my brother, 18 years back.
I've got emails where we discuss my nephew when he was born - "he's a spud!" - he's now a BIG potato.
Google has access to _all_ of this data - every single last bit of it.
Every email I ever sent, every email I've ever received - they have ALL of it. For as long as they want.
I handed over the keys to my private ramblings, for free email.
My private ramblings, under law right now, are still private, but only so long as the T's and C's of the Google terms and conditions remain in my favour, regarding that.
I was a fool - and I'm still a fool - but I'm playing the "security via obscurity" card.
Why would anyone be interested in MY data?
Why would anyone CARE what emails I sent?
Yep - that's a valid case to make, if you weren't breaking the law of _that time_, who cares, right?
But what if some crazy dystopian regime gains power where you live?
What if they want to root out any people they consider as being "unlawful"?
What if they demand that Google use algorithms to seek out dissent to the current status-quo?
We can go _even futher_ than this.
What if you were _careful_ ? - What if you were very clever, with ALL of your private dealings online?
What if your footprint was small, but ultimately, you were still _known_ - identity number, drivers license, maybe an email account?
What if the _first_ thing a dystopian government did, was to do a data dive into what they considered _deviants_ - those with a footprint that was _too_ small - that was _suspect_.
What then?
Ok, no more beer for me right now, despite being that fool who _still_ uses an 18 year old gmail account, despite having a digital footprint that leads right to the house I live in, ... whatevs.... right? /s
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The fact that you don't care and don't see this as a massive problem within the industry and the world as a whole, means you are an idiot.
Well, thanks for that - I'm sure you spend an inordinate amount of time slavishly covering every single digital footprint you make, good for you! (slow clap)
Hows the weather in Milwaukee?
Rolling on and on... (Score:2)
So, yeah, the idea of a dystopian regime - which seems more likely in the USA and across the pond in the UK, with each passing day...
I can see some odd things panning out, here's my fictional representation of enforcement agency staff in an area, having a chat:
Officer One: "So, the boss has got the latest data from BigBrainAI, came down from District 9, we're gonna be busy!"
Officer Two: "Oh yeah, how so? - more deviants to round up?"
Officer One: "Pretty much - our zone was scanned again - lots of false posi
Couldn't compete with MS OneDrive? (Score:5, Interesting)
MS has put a lot of effort into marketing and improving OneDrive. The price is hard to beat, with up to 5 TB for about $100 per year, plus they include Office in the deal. Google Drive gives you only 2 TB for that price. Amazon's price has been similar to Google's, but doesn't have any automatic sync capability.
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The price was easy to beat. Up until recently, "OneDrive", Amazon Drive, and Google Drive were all free up to a fairly large capacity, and the capacity offered had been increasing in size. Now, they're aiming to reduce capacity and require subscriptions or, just killing the products off.
I don't mind having a little free cloud capacity for some of my key files, although these services have always worked very badly. OneDrive will cheerfully remove your files from your computer entirely, just giving them back
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If you like Google Drive and are frustrated by multiple downloads, you might like Google Drive for Desktop: https://sites.google.com/view/... [google.com]
This syncs ALL you drive files to your hard drive.
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Go beyond that, and you get tacked on bullshit.
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He was closer
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
99 a year for 6TB but limit 1 TB per user so I guess you have to sort your files into users which is odd
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Microsoft doesn't have anything that remotely competes with Google Photos. I have 5TB plans with both Microsoft and Google. Google is close to full full and I don't even bother to sign in to Microsoft even on Windows machines, and the difference has everything to do with what Google Photos offers and the absolute nothing that Microsoft offers in that space. I give not a single shit about Office; Google Docs and Sheets are find for my needs, no matter what I'm paid to administer.
Interesting (Score:3)
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Yeah, but if it was unencrypted they're probably getting warrants and NSL's and want to get away from it. You can layer encfs on s3fs or whatever those fuse modules are called. But there are better S3 providers too.
I am actually impressed by the length of notice. I was expecting to see 9/30/2022. Good for them.
meh (Score:1)
I've got an amazon Drive (Score:4, Informative)
When Blackberry and Amazon made a deal to include the Amazon App Store on BB phones, that included an offer for Extra Space on free Amazon-Drive accounts for BB users. I set it up, but never used it since then.
Rememeber that Amazon had 3 uses for drive:
Competing with the then-new services like DropBox, Box and Google drive (at that it failed miserably).
Provide an alternative drive for Amazon Phones (remmeber those, the amazon phone failed miserably on its first iteration).
Make the Amazon Drive the central repository for things like legal CD-Audio Rips, when you buy your physiscal CDs (remember those?) from Amazon.
So, sad to see it go, but really a logical move. If anything, it took them too long a time.
At least Amazon Drive can't unionize now (Score:2)
workdocs drive (Score:2)
they still have workdocs drive, but that's always a paid service so not exactly for consumers. it's designed to be a cheap corporate collaboration tool
Seriously? (Score:2)