Amazon has discontinued unlimited storage for Amazon Drive. Lets look at alternatives.

Christian Bagley
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Published 7/10/2017 by CBagley

Amazon recently announced that they would be discontinuing their unlimited storage option for Amazon Cloud Drive subscribers. It wasn’t long ago that Amazon announced the unlimited storage option for Amazon Drive, which was introduced in March 2015. Originally, Amazon offered subscribers unlimited file storage for $60.00/yr, an attractive price for those seeking a place to park their data. Now, just 2 years later, subscribers receive the unsettling news that their storage limit will be downgraded.

So what does this mean for current subscribers? If you are currently a subscriber for Amazon Drive “Unlimited,” you are able to stay on your current unlimited plan up until your date of renewal. Once you reach your renewal date you have the option to renew under one of the new storage limit tiers, the changes are specified by Amazon:

“Amazon will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan. Instead, we’ll offer annual storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for >$59.99, up to 30 TB for an additional $59.99 per TB.”

Make sure to choose your tier or migrate your data prior to your renewal date, otherwise you will be automatically renewed to a storage tier based on the current amount of storage space you’re using.

Many providers mentioned below have a 1TB storage limit for individual users. If you’re a current Amazon Drive subscriber and aren’t using >1TB of storage, there may be no cause for concern and you can stay with Amazon Drive. If you’re worried about more changes to Amazon’s service options in the future or you’re scrambling to find a new provider, don’t worry.


Let’s look at some alternatives:

If you’re looking for file storage, syncing, sharing, and require <1TB of storage, you might consider these:

If you’re focus is on finding a service centered on privacy and security, these may be a good fit for you:

Tresorit

  • 1 TB of storage
  • $30/month
  • Offers end-to-end encryption

pCloud

  • 2 TB of storage
  • $14.99/month
  • Encryption of encrypted folders is done locally

SpiderOak

  • 100GB of storage for $5/month
  • 250GB of storage for $9/month
  • 1TB of storage for $12/month
  • 5TB of storage for $25/month

If you used Amazon Cloud Drive Unlimited for complete backups, you likely require more space than the above services above provide. If that is the case, consider

BackBlaze

  • Unlimited backup for $5/month

Storj may be worth checking out. Storj is a unique storage service being offered that is Blockchain-based (the same technology that Bitcoin uses). Storj is considered a decentralized and distributed storage solution, that offers peer-to-peer based storage with the ability to store large amounts of data.

All of the services listed above have many features that aren’t listed, so make sure to check the links provided above to compare them and find a service that works best for your situation.

Update: I previously included information in this post about Carbonite as a possible alternative to Amazon Drive for backups. Unfortunatey, Carbonite has since announced that they would be discontinuing their consumer based backup service.


Originally published at alternativeto.net.

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Christian Bagley

Written by

Student @ Columbia University studying Psychology. Interested in Computational Psychology, NLP, and Information Processing.

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