Amazon Drive is closing on January 31, 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Drive is closing on January 31, 2023

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54 pointsrullopat14 comments

I guess they couldn't afford the S3 costs?! :-)

Jokes aside, it makes sense to shut down, I can't imagine many Prime subscribers knew they had it, and it's probably a huge headache for them to worry about it being used for copyright infringement, etc... but it is odd timing to announce this now with the recent increase in Amazon Prime's membership fee.

Pivoting it to Photo/Video library archival is probably more useful to consumers (and cynically probably more useful data for Amazon...)

Prime members don't get Drive. (Except for the 5GB free tier.) It's a separate subscription.

Prime members do get Photos, which is staying.

Looked at this recently because I'm on the verge of upgrading my Dropbox to a bigger tier but even though files were syncing they changed the dates. Maybe it was a bug but that instantly was big no for me. Honestly I just wish Dropbox has a "consumer" tier, I don't need 2TB and don't want to pay 12€ for that. Something for 3-5€ would be much better

Is that much money a month really a concern? It seems prudent from a business perspective for Dropbox to not cater to price sensitive customers.

(I have a Dropbox annual plan)

It just feels like I'd pay for something I don't need. I don't even pay now, I'm using the free storage which is great and I _want_ to pay but to me there is a lack of option between the free 2GB or the paid 2TB. Even though the byte/cost could be higher with a lower tier (say 200GB for 5€)

Value is, admittedly, subjective. I once felt the same (this much for storage!?) but let us enumerate the value: 2TB of durable storage with highly reliable syncing services, web interface, mobile apps, selective sync, sharing/links, etc. Is that enough to make 10€ palatable? To each their own value decision. For me, the time savings using the product and the piece of mind are worth the cost (although I also pay Apple $10/month for iCloud storage, and would move from Dropbox is iCloud files reached parity wrt sync/selective sync).

If 200GB is enough, you can use Google One.

It took me a minute to recall what Amazon Drive is/was. It debuted well after I was using Dropbox, Google Drive, and (to some extent) iCloud file storage. I didn’t have a need for Amazon Drive.

Amazon Photos, however, with unlimited storage has been great for archiving family photos.

I just received the email. Worth noting that you will still be able to view and download your files until December 31, 2023.

Time to set up killedbyamazon.com?

I totally forgot that I even had stuff on here into the email.

Nice reminder of what I was doing back then looking at those project documents!

Google Drive is a seriously good software. I don't use the desktop sync service but the web service is pretty smooth and fast...

I disagree. Google Drive has become worse over the years and I wouldn't consider it good anymore. My biggest gripe: Google Drive does no longer synchronize photos to desktop, but only supports one way upload to Google Photos. Apparently users got confused and deleted their own photos and thus Google pulled the plug on syncing the photos at all.

P.S.: Google Drive desktop was renamed to Backup & Sync which is usually the first sign a Google service is doomed.

The new Google Drive desktop has caused me a lot more problems than Backup and Sync. Moved to Duplicati yesterday. I'll miss the live backup but having uploads fail every few hours and no way to exclude certain sizes and extensions like you could in Backup and Sync was a drag

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