One week worth of uploads.

So how long does it took for me to upload almost 500GB of photos to Amazon Cloud Drive? Almost 8 days, non-stop. My Macbook Air was literally switched on, 24/7 for an entire week, so that I could get every single 65,000 or so photos totalling close to half a terabyte uploaded to the cloud. It was not fun at all, especially when the Amazon Cloud has no native sync support. It simply offered a desktop app, where you simply drag and drop files to the app and it will upload to the cloud. The good thing is that I consolidated all my photos in a single giant folder, consisting of even more folders to organise my photos. So I simply drag that huge ass folder to the upload application and it soon started uploading to the cloud.

Speeds vary, but personally it was generally fast, and I did not encounter connection problems to the cloud servers at all during the upload process. There weren’t any issues of missing files, double uploads, repeated files, or anything like that. The file structure was maintained perfectly, and as the progress bar inched it way to the finish line, the Cloud Drive slowly fills up and the chart tells you how many photos, files and videos you have in the cloud. I am taking advantage of the first 3 month trial period, uploading  a massive number of files in such a short time. I shudder at the thought of downloading every single one of them, should my current hard drive fail and I am forced to get a new one and repopulate my new drive. I wonder how fast it would be over the long term download process.

In the end, while the uploading is a huge hassle and extremely inefficient, it is relatively economical in simply paying 60 bucks year for unlimited cloud storage. I am still mulling whether cloud backup or raid redundancy is the best solution for me, given my needs. While having both is good, as it provides not only local backup, but offshore backup as well, in truth, I don’t really have the luxury of doing that. In the end, I have to choose and weigh my option carefully. The local backup solution required a pretty heavy investment in getting a DAS, or NAS with all the hard drives needed to populate it and creating proper redundancy. The cloud backup solution requires you to upload any new files regularly, keeping to a schedule so that in an even when the drive fails, you will encounter minimal file loss.

I will continue to use the free trial and see how it all pans out in the future. I really do hope that Amazon have plans to add new features to the cloud drive, and perhaps one day, rival that of Dropbox in terms of functionality and ease of use. I still find dropbox to  be the gold standard in cloud storage in terms of functionality.