Amazon Drive Cloud Storage Service Being Discontinued Next Year

If you're a current Amazon Drive customer, you might want to think about offloading your files from the cloud service sooner rather than later. Amazon just sent out an email informing customers that the service will be discontinued on December 31, 2023, giving you just over a year to get your affairs in order.

"Over the last 11 years, Amazon Drive has served as a secure cloud storage service for Amazon customers to back up their files," said Amazon in the email sent to current Amazon Drive customers. "On December 31, 2023, we will no longer support Amazon Drive to more fully focus our efforts on photos and video storage with Amazon Photos."

For those unfamiliar with Amazon Drive, it enables every Amazon customer to upload 5GB of files for free. In the case of Amazon Drive, customers can securely store photos, videos, and documents in the cloud. PC and Mac users can upload and download files to Amazon Drive using a web browser, while Android and iOS users can interface with the service using an app.

While 5GB of storage is provided for free, Amazon offers paid tiers starting at $1.99/month for 100GB on up to $11.99/month for 2TB of Amazon Drive storage. 

"We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with Amazon Photos," Amazon continued in its email. Amazon Photos is similar in concept to Amazon Drive, except that it only allows customers to upload photos and video. 

One perk of Amazon Photos is that customers with a Prime membership can access unlimited photo storage. On the other hand, Prime members are limited to just 5GB of free video storage. If you want to increase your Amazon Photos video storage with a Prime membership, additional storage starts at $1.99/month for 100GB.

With the impending demise of Amazon Drive, it's probably a good time to look at alternative cloud storage solutions for your documents like Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, or iCloud Drive (if you're an Apple user).