A lot has changed in Amazon’s offerings in the past year. In September 2022, the company increased the prices for its Prime subscription. This was followed by price increases for Amazon Music Unlimited and Kindle Unlimited. At the same time, some services were discontinued or adjusted. One of them is Amazon Drive, which will soon disappear permanently from the Prime subscription.
Amazon is no longer just an online shipping company. In addition to a large range of different products and services, the company now also offers a streaming and music service, eBooks and digital magazines and much more. For a long time, the cloud service Amazon Drive was also part of the portfolio, for many an insider tip when it comes to online data backup. But it will finally be discontinued this year.
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Amazon Drive will finally be discontinued at the end of 2023
At the beginning of the year, Amazon announced in one official announcement announced that it will restrict access to the Drive cloud service over the course of the year until it is completely discontinued at the end of 2023. This applies to both the limited, free version and the unlimited version integrated into Prime. Since then January 31, 2023 It is no longer possible to upload data to the cloud. However, the files already stored there could still be accessed. But here too, an important deadline will soon come to an end.
App users only have until October 31, 2023 possible to access the data in Amazon Drive. After that, this path is finally closed. And access to Amazon’s in-house cloud via the browser is only possible until December 31, 2023 possible. Anyone who uses Amazon Drive only has a few days or weeks to back up data from the cloud to another location if necessary. From 2024 at the latest, Amazon Drive users will finally have to look for an alternative.
The company explains the decision to discontinue Amazon Drive as follows: “We are taking the opportunity to focus our efforts more on Amazon Photos to offer customers a dedicated solution for storing photos and videos.” The related cloud service Amazon Photos is therefore not affected by the measure. But here too, users complained about deteriorations within the app after an update at the end of 2022.
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What happens to the stored data?
After Amazon Drive is finally discontinued at the end of the year, users will no longer have access to the data stored there. If you haven’t already found an alternative and deleted your Amazon Drive account by then, you will at least find your stored photos and videos automatically on Amazon Photos. All other data will be deleted by Amazon after an explicit notification.
The Amazon Photos service is also available in a paid and a free version. However, the latter is limited to 5 GB of storage space. Prime members, on the other hand, have unlimited photo storage and only video storage space is capped at 5 GB. Starting at 19.99 euros per year (or 1.99 euros per month), you can expand your Amazon Photos storage piece by piece, both with and without a Prime subscription. The most comprehensive package contains around 30 TB of space for images and around 4,200 hours of video material in 1080p HD, but costs 2,999.70 euros per year. However, there are still various gradations in between.
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Alternatives to Amazon Drive
Numerous providers now offer their own cloud service – above all Google and Apple, where the free storage space is limited. If you need more, you have to pay here too. If you only store photos and videos in the cloud, you can alternatively switch to Amazon Photos. But if you like to store other file types, you should look elsewhere.
Apple’s iCloud Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive, for example, offer 5 GB of storage for free, Google Drive even offers 15 GB, while Dropbox offers 2 GB. With all of the providers mentioned, you can also add different amounts of storage to your subscription.