Amazon has been in the news for several days. One of the reasons for this is due to the announcement of the price increase of its Amazon Prime service, which goes from 36 euros per year to 49.90 euros. This rise is due, among other things, to inflation and the increase in indirect costs in our country. But this is not going to be the only change that we are going to see shortly, and that is that one of the services of this giant is going to close its doors shortly: amazon-drive.
In a market where Google and Microsoft have their own clouds and give users free storage space, Amazon was not going to be far behind. So, in 2011, the company launched its own cloud called Amazon CloudDrive. All users with an Amazon account had 5 GB of storage completely free to store all the data they wanted on it. In addition, those who needed additional storage could access a series of paid plans with more storage.
Although this service did not become as popular as Google or Microsoft, it had a significant number of users. And, above all, it has been used a lot to share files through email. As part of the evolution of this service, the giant offered users the possibility of having unlimited photo and video storage, as well as the possibility of having unlimited storage for only 60 euros a year. Unfortunately, this last improvement was removed two years later.
Now, Amazon has decided to discontinue this service in order to focus on Amazon Photos. And so the company has put a death date on Amazon Drive: the December 31, 2023.
What happens after the closure of Amazon Drive
If we have ever used this service, and we have saved data in this cloud, we will receive a message informing us of the imminent closure of the service. Since then, we will have until December 31, 2023 to download our data if we do not want to lose it. In case of not doing it, after the date, we will lose them forever.
The closing process will be carried out as follows:
- On October 31 this year, the apps will be removed from the Android and iOS stores.
- On January 31, 2023, the possibility of uploading new data will be eliminated.
- On December 31, 2023, the cloud will be permanently closed, and all data will be deleted.
It is important to note that Amazon Photos will not be affected for the closure of this service. Rather the opposite. The company is going to focus much more on improving this service to offer better functions and features to users. All registered Amazon users have 5 GB free to upload their photos and videos to this cloud, while Amazon Prime users have unlimited photo storage and 5 GB to upload videos.
If we used Amazon Drive, and we ran out of cloud, we recommend Google Drive, OneDrive, and even Dropbox as alternatives.
