If you have important files backed up to Amazon Drive, it’s time to make sure you have copies elsewhere. Amazon has sent emails to customers saying its cloud storage platform will be shut down at the end of next year, and once that deadline passes, some files will be lost forever.
Why some files and not all? Well, the change is driven by the company’s new focus on Amazon Photos, which means that if you have photos and videos in your Amazon Drive account, they will automatically move. Amazon Prime members get unlimited storage of full-resolution photos and 5GB of video, while non-Prime customers get a total of 5GB for everything.
However, other file types currently supported by Amazon Drive won’t make the jump, so you have until December 31, 2023 to retrieve them. After that, it’s up to you whether you want to store them locally or consider the best cloud storage options available.
Amazon Drive will continue to operate as it has for the past decade until October 31, when the Amazon Drive app will be removed from the Android and iOS marketplaces. Then, on January 31, you won’t be able to download anything and the service will only serve as a repository for files that have already been downloaded. From there, you will have exactly 11 months to recover files that are not compatible with Amazon Photos.
“We understand that content saved to Amazon Drive is very important to our customers,” the company writes in a new FAQ page. (opens in a new tab) explaining the change. “We will communicate our plan for removing or deleting files by December 31, 2023 and give customers enough time to save their files.
“Customers are encouraged to use Amazon Photos to access photo and video files and download all other files locally (or with another service) by December 31, 2023.”
It’s unclear how many people were actively using Amazon Drive, but that probably isn’t enough to justify reserving storage when the company needs to provide unlimited photo uploads to its Prime customers. Either way, if you have valuable documents in Amazon’s cloud, now is the time to make sure they’re safely backed up elsewhere.
Alternative cloud storage options
If you have a lot of files stored in the cloud and want to keep them, you’re in luck. The rise of cloud computing means that there is a whole suite of cloud storage options.
One of the most popular is Google Drive, which syncs with your Google account and can come with a productivity suite: think Google Docs, Sheets and Forms. 15GB is provided free with the option to pay more if needed.
Microsoft OneDrive provides 5 GB of free cloud storage linked to your Microsoft account. And Dropbox’s free tier offers 2GB of cloud storage; not a huge amount, but plenty to store a handful of Word documents and the odd PDF.
And Apple users have access to iCloud which pretty much automatically gives you 5GB of cloud storage when you set up an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook. Like the services above, you can then pay to increase storage capacity.
So even with Amazon Drive now on borrowed time, you have plenty of options to keep whatever file and photos you want in the cloud.