I am very impressed with Amazon Cloud Drive’s latest roll-out. In a prior article, I discussed my family’s personal photo/video storage system. And, Amazon was nowhere in that mix. All of that recently changed.
Here are some of the latest changes to its Cloud Drive app:
- Upload photos and videos from your camera roll.
- Upload files from other cloud storage services.
- Create and edit text files. New files you make will be automatically saved in Cloud Drive.
- Create folders.
- Move files between folders.
- Download your original files to your smartphone or tablet.
Given, all of these features are fairly basic when compared with Google and OneDrive. However, Amazon’s latest update make it a viable solution for a secondary back-up to your file system.
The price may be its greatest feature. At $59.95, you get unlimited storage. It’s pretty hard to argue with that. This is obviously considerably less than other services. I have been putting that storage to the limit this week. I am up to 600GB and counting. Just for being Amazon Prime you get 5GB of storage, plus unlimited photos. So, depending on what you have, you might not even need the unlimited storage.
I do love the desktop app. At first, I was not in love with it. Here’s why. I am accustomed to the standard Dropbox/OneDrive/Google interface that easily allow you to drop files into a folder and wait on them to upload. But, what about your past files? What about something you put on a hard drive 3 years ago? All of these other services are not a great solution for that. But, Amazon is. 
I am in the process, right now, of backing up a hard drive with 1.4TB on it. It’s a matter of dragging and dropping into the app, and Amazon Cloud Drive does a great job with that. That’s a pretty great feature when none of the other services have that. Sure, it takes you a long time to back-up a terabyte. But, doing so will give you peace of mind. No more fouled up hard drives being destroyed along with your precious memories.
Then, there is the desktop app. Given, there are features that I wish Amazon had (e.g., geolocation) but I do like one thing. 
Click the heart button in the app and you can actually see photos and videos that occurred on this day 2 years ago … 3 years ago… 10 years ago. I think that’s pretty fun!
Some of the new mobile functionality actually puts the app on par with some of the others, as well.
All in all – Amazon is a great backup solution for your precious memories for the price. The infinite nature of the storage is a compelling value add. Right now, on OneDrive, I can see me filling up my OneDrive account (max of 1TB) by the end of the year. But, with Amazon, you don’t have limits.
It’s definitely a great service to add to your storage arsenal.
No comments yet.