Amazon has a cloud service for backing up photos and videos, fittingly called Amazon Photos, but the company also offered regular cloud storage that worked like Dropbox or OneDrive. Now, that option is going away.
Amazon Drive, which used to be called Amazon Cloud Storage, can be used to upload files and folders from a computer or mobile device. The data can be accessed later from amazon.com/clouddrive, or through the desktop and mobile apps. The service was mostly popular due to various promotions, like Amazon offering 20 GB of storage for a year at the low price of 89 cents.
Thurrott reports Amazon is sending emails to people who used Amazon Drive about the service’s shutdown. The company said, “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.”
Amazon Drive has slowly merged with Amazon Photos, the company’s backup and sync solution for photos and videos (like Google Photos), over the past few years. Besides the Drive site, the only way to access Amazon Drive files is through the Amazon Photos apps on mobile and desktop. The service offers unlimited photo storage for Prime customers, along with 5 GB of free video storage (people without Prime get 5 GB for both).
The good news is that there are plenty of other options for cloud storage, and if you used Amazon Drive, you have plenty of time to migrate your files to another platform.
Source: Thurrott
