Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon Drive cloud offering. Fortunately, users of the service have some time to secure files saved in the cloud in other services or locally — the end-of-life date is scheduled for December 31, 2023.
Amazon Drive started out as Amazon Cloud Drive in 2011, and the cloud storage was founded as a competitor to Google Drive, Onedrive, iCloud Drive and Dropbox.
The goal of this change, as Amazon explains, is to focus on storing photos and videos with Amazon Photos, so users will lose the ability to upload other types of files. Prime members get unlimited storage space for full-resolution photos plus 5 GB of video storage space. In the future, Amazon will also market unlimited photo storage space for non-Prime customers. It costs $12 a year and also includes 5GB of data storage for other file types. A three-month free trial period is also offered.
Amazon does not provide a file migration tool. Instead, users must manually download each file they wish to extract from Amazon Drive from the website before the service becomes inaccessible.
The Amazon Drive app will stop receiving updates and will be removed from the iOS and Android app stores on October 31, 2022. On January 31, 2023, Amazon will stop supporting file uploads.
