Amazon has ended its unlimited cloud storage. Reverts to 1TB for US$59.90

Recently Amazon announced that they will no longer be offering unlimited cloud storage through Amazon Drive. Instead, the company will be offering cloud storage starting at 1TB for US$59.00 a year and the cost increases accordingly for each 1TB needed for up to 30TB.

This is disappointing news for me as I have been relying on Amazon Drive (since the announcement of unlimited cloud storage) for a safe place to store and grow my photo collection.

As someone who picked up photography as a hobby, I have amassed almost 100,000 photos and I need a safe place to store them apart from my usual portable hard drive as my main repository of photographs. That amounts to almost 900GB. I am almost hitting the 1TB limit and now that they announce that additional 1TB of storage would cost another US$59.90, I would have no choice but to shop elsewhere for a cheaper alternative to store my expanding collection of photos.

I have started migrating some files that are not photographs or pictures to my OneDrive account (I have 1TB courtesy of the Office 365 account and intend to keep it in the long term) They are mostly pictures taken from my smartphone, past and present (I am sentimental, although a majority of them are rubbish photos sent via WhatsApp and stored on my phone). They don’t constitute a large portion of the space required, just maybe 20Gb or so.

To make the migration easier for the thousands of documents and smartphone pictures stored in various folders, I employed the use to MultCloud, a cloud migration web app, that assists you in migrating swathes of files from one cloud to another. It is free to use and allows you to transfer up to 2TB of data. For VIP users (in a form of a subscription) you can have an unlimited transfer to multiple cloud storage services at one go and also speeds up the transfer by transferring multiple files in parallel.

I can clearly see the benefit of subscribing to the VIP services for a month, as the transfer can get quite slow. It is definitely easy as you simply tell the web app which folder you want to transfer from one cloud to another. But before you do that, you have to map all your cloud storage services under the MultiCloud interface. That way, it will recognise all the cloud services you have and it will then initiate the data transfer. Other than file transfer, MultCloud allows you to synchronise data between two cloud or simply use MultCloud as a one stop app to access all your files across multiple cloud services under your wing.

Once the file migration is complete I will close down Amazon Drive and will no longer use its services.

My next solution is to start backing up the hard drive with all my photos using BackBlaze. BackBlaze primary feature is to create backups of your PC or Mac, especially your personal files. For a flat fee of US$50, you have unlimited data for backing up your files from ONE computer as well as any attached portable hard drives that you have. This means that BackBlaze allows me to backup my portable hard drive containing all my photos (and some video files).

This is not the best solution as it solely serves as a backup repository but since I rarely access most of my photos taken during my photography session, there is no need to access those files from BackBlaze’s servers. So long as my portable hard drive is still functioning, I will continue to use that and not disturb any of the files that have been backed up in BackBlaze. Should my hard drive fail, then I simply get a new one then restore all the files from BackBlaze.