When it comes to cloud backup, Amazon knows its stuff. AWS and S3 are some of the most trusted names available. But so far, its cloud power has been mostly limited to developers and companies. Amazon never really had an attractive cloud backup product for consumers.
With the newly launched Amazon Cloud Drive, it plans to change that. But don’t let the names “Drive” and “Cloud” fool you. It’s not like Google Drive or iCloud Drive. It doesn’t have collaboration tools or even two-way sync.
what is it exactly? And why is it so cheap? Are we looking at another case of being too cheap to be good? Read to find out.
What exactly is Amazon Cloud Drive?
I have said this many times at Guiding Tech: “The cloud is a mystery”. It’s almost become my catchphrase.
Amazon Cloud Drive is no different. Cloud Drive comes in two plans – “Unlimited Photos” and “All Things Unlimited” (both with an attractive 3-month trial period). The problem is that the website doesn’t convey exactly what you’re getting. And the language they use makes you believe it’s like any other cloud storage service. It cannot.
Unlike Dropbox or Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive doesn’t have two-way sync or a full-fledged desktop client. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of version control.
And here’s the big problem – you can’t assign a folder to Amazon Cloud Drive on your Mac/Windows and sync everything in that folder seamlessly to the cloud and to your other devices. Come on guys – this is cloud sync 101.
What can it do
So Unlimited Plan is really unlimited. For a dollar a month you can get Unlimited photos plan. This allows you to automatically back up any photos from your phone to Amazon Cloud Drive. Plus any photos you choose to upload using the desktop app or website.
Unlimited photo backups for just a dollar a month is a great deal – I’ll give you that.
Unlimited Everything is the hard part. It’s $60 a year — or $5 a month where you can upload any type of file — music, video, documents — anything you want.
But it does not have a large application library like Dropbox (here is the meager library of Cloud Drive applications). It doesn’t have the same documentation set as Google Drive, nor does it have great plugin support.
Should you use it?
The problem with Cloud Drive is that it’s not good enough. It cannot replace Google Drive or Dropbox for you. The best it can do is be the place where you dump all your files for safekeeping. And it can’t even do that well.
Services like Backblaze offer unlimited backups for $5 a month, and they have great mobile and Mac apps where they automatically back up all your files, keeping track of changes. , upload them, allow you to recover any file from anywhere, etc. There’s nothing like it with Cloud Drive. If you want to upload files, you’ll need to do it manually – every time.
Amazon Cloud Drive is not for you, Jeremy.
I think the dollar a month photo backup service is really good. Yes, Flickr gives you the same features but is limited to 1 TB for free – honestly, that’s more than enough for most people. Cloud Drive has a web interface where you can edit files, move them, and more. This can help you better manage your photo memory.
I cannot recommend Amazon’s Everything Unlimited plan to anyone with a good conscience. Yes, it’s cheap but so is Backblaze, which is better.
And I’m sure most of what’s eating up your Dropbox storage are photos. If you effectively take that out of the equation, you can use Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud Drive for documents without any problems. Think about it.
Do you think Amazon has a chance?
I think Amazon’s cloud infrastructure is spectacular. However, they are lacking in consumer-facing products. They don’t even seem to know what people want and how to give it to them. It’s a basic thing and without doing that, they’re not going anywhere.
Will Amazon realize its mistake? Will Dropbox/Google drop their cloud storage prices in return? Is the “cloud” just a fad that won’t last more than 18 months?
All this and more next time, on Guiding Tech.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
