Amazon Ends Its Unlimited Cloud Storage Plan

Megalith

Megalith

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It looks like I’m going to have to find a new cloud backup solution: Amazon has killed off their unlimited storage option for Amazon Drive. Originally, the service let you upload as much as you want for $59.99 a year, but now that price will only get you 1 TB of storage. Current subscribers will be forced to change to plans that start at $11.99 a year for 100 GB and end at $1799.70 a year for 30 TB. Prime members will still get unlimited cloud storage for photos, however.

Another cloud storage party is over, guys: Amazon has sunsetted its unlimited cloud storage plan for Amazon Drive - although members of its Prime subscription club will still get unlimited cloud storage for photos. From today, people signing up for Amazon Drive will not be able to select an unlimited cloud storage option. Instead they can choose either 100 GB for $11.99 per year, or 1 TB for $59.99, with up to 30 TB available for an additional $59.99 per TB. (The prior pricing was $11.99pa for unlimited photos or unlimited everything for $59.99.) All sign ups still get 5GB of storage gratis. Best to think of that as getting your first hit for free.
 
Glad I didn't jump on the unlimited plan when it was on sale. If it sounds too good to be true it is.
 
chenw said:
$60 per year per TB? I'd be able to set up couple of RAID 1's in different locations for cheaper than that...
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Do tell. Because if my estimates are correct, creating multiple CBS sites, connecting them, maintaining and securing them far exceeds that amount yearly. Unless you're planning to put together enough storage that you'll have to take out a hefty mortgage to finance it.

$60/TB/YR isn't cheap but it's still under what it would take to make a DIY cloud. Which, for the everyman, means they'll bitch and moan and then pay up.

EDIT: Which still, the photo storage isn't going anywhere so what exactly is everyone storing that's taking up so much space? I mean, you'd have to be putting up a metric ton of spreadsheets and word docs to come even close to 1TB of storage.
 
SomeoneElse said:
You can buy 2TB drives for this price.....and setup your own "cloud access". I've always hated the "cloud" model.... pay someone to keep your files. There is no privacy when your files sit on someone else's servers.
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You can just encrypt and password protect everything automatically on there ofc it takes a bit to set up but not exactly beyond difficult to do if you're really concerned.
 
U-238 said:
Do tell. Because if my estimates are correct, creating multiple CBS sites, connecting them, maintaining and securing them far exceeds that amount yearly. Unless you're planning to put together enough storage that you'll have to take out a hefty mortgage to finance it.

$60/TB/YR isn't cheap but it's still under what it would take to make a DIY cloud. Which, for the everyman, means they'll bitch and moan and then pay up.

EDIT: Which still, the photo storage isn't going anywhere so what exactly is everyone storing that's taking up so much space? I mean, you'd have to be putting up a metric ton of spreadsheets and word docs to come even close to 1TB of storage.
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I wasn't comparing to a DIY cloud, I merely compared it to making RAID 1's in multiple locations to emulate redundancy of Amazon Cloud.

For file sharing aspect of Cloud, there are also other alternatives to Amazon cloud, EG Google Drive
 
Semantics said:
You can just encrypt and password protect everything automatically on there ofc it takes a bit to set up but not exactly beyond difficult to do if you're really concerned.
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Yes but thats already proved to not be enough. Just because its encrypted doesn't make it bullet proof. If the service goes down or goes under your files go with it.
 
SomeoneElse said:
Yes but thats already proved to not be enough. Just because its encrypted doesn't make it bullet proof. If the service goes down or goes under your files go with it.
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Service going under isn't that different from your backup drive dying, in that with a dead drive, you copy the data onto another and throw away the dead drive. With cloud, you simply move onto the next cloud service.

The main difference is when someone unwanted intrudes.

For your physical drive, it's your average joe burglar, which usually won't have a clue what you actually do for a living (unless you work at home), so will either ignore your HDDs or, even if they take it, probably pawn it off. Your next average joe pawn shop buyer also probably won't bother looking into a password protected file and format the drive, along with your data.

For your cloud drive, anyone who can get into your cloud account is typically tech savvie, so they'll have a MUCH greater likelihood of getting your data, since they broke in and got it in the first place.

It is for this reason that I conclude cloud backup is inherently unsafe, because not only you are a weakness to your own encryption, there is an extra layer of weakness on the security of the providers.

(One could also argue that someone could specifically target your house and steal your HDD's to get your data, my argument is, if the other party can do that, you have a MUCH bigger problem than losing your data).

EDIT: Oh, also throught another thing. When a cloud service goes under, there is really nothing stopping the company (albeit extremely unlikely) from releasing some of its clients data as a 'suicide' attack, with a dead HDD, you can simply smash it to pieces and that's that. I freely admit this is extremely farfetched though.
 
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SomeoneElse said:
Yes but thats already proved to not be enough. Just because its encrypted doesn't make it bullet proof. If the service goes down or goes under your files go with it.
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Yeah but if you're using it as offsite backup it shouldn't be your only source of your files. Just saying if privacy is your concern you can set it up to automatically encrypt and obfuscate your files in any cloud service so that they don't even know what you have on there.
 
Unlimited tech anything never lasts. People come out of the woodwork to use ridiculous quantites of the service because they can.

Not just tech, unlimited anything, really. Back when I worked in a ~1500 person office, the company would occassionally get rid of old stuff like chairs, laptop bags, bknders/office supplies, etc. Hundreds of identical items would be placed in one of the entrance lobbies for staff to take. Then some scientist on staff started pulling up rented trucks at 5am to take it all away to hoard somewhere, so they had to put security on the stuff and make people only take a couple. The best part was the guy was mad that they wouldn't let him have it all.
 
chenw said:
Service going under isn't that different from your backup drive dying.

The main difference is when someone unwanted intrudes.

For your physical drive, it's your average joe burglar, which usually won't have a clue what you actually do for a living (unless you work at home), so will either ignore your HDDs or, even if they take it, probably pawn it off. Your next average joe pawn shop buyer also probably won't bother looking into a password protected file and format the drive, along with your data.

For your cloud drive, anyone who can get into your cloud account is typically tech savvie, so they'll have a MUCH greater likelihood of getting your data, since they broke in and got it in the first place.

It is for this reason that I conclude cloud backup is inherently unsafe, because not only you are a weakness to your own encryption, there is an extra layer of weakness on the security of the providers.

(One could also argue that someone could specifically target your house and steal your HDD's to get your data, my argument is, if the other party can do that, you have a MUCH bigger problem than losing your data).
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No i get it but you are paying a company per year which if you set this stuff up on your one its a one time cost which will pay for itself after a year or so. Then the company pulls the bait a switch and you pay more for less.....
 
Oh the days of unlimited are nearing an end. And based on my experience, I am not surprised about Amazon's move. I've already been burnt twice on the promise of unlimited storage just for the provider to rescind their offer.

The first one to bite me was Bitcasa. They offered unlimited storage for $80 for the first year ($100 a year following) and promised that your account would be grandfathered to this plan providing you: a) don't change your plan, b) you fulfill your payments. It seemed pretty great. They didn't restrict your use based on OS, encryption, no bandwidth throttling, you can connect as many computers/devices to it as you wanted, you had the ability to revert to older file versions with their archiving capability, etc. Sure, they were a young company and initially their app had some teething issues, but the price was right and improvements were constantly being made. Yeah, that lasted about 1.5 years...tops. Initially, they said they were doing away with the unlimited plan but that those grandfathered in had nothing to worry about so long as they met the criteria I mentioned above. Then a few months later they made a BS claim that they were upgrading their servers which required us customers to upgrade/migrate our accounts to take advantage of the performance improvements. But...by doing so you forfeit your grandfathered privilieges because the migration changes your plan type and will now be limited to just 1TB of space. If you have more than 1TB already in their cloud, you will automatically be upgraded to their stupidly expensive plans (I had around 3+ TB of data at the time). Oh, by the way! If you don't upgrade/migrate your account by the end of the month, they will simply deactivate your account and delete all your data. So that grandfather clause they had and claimed to honor: Screw you, we've created a loophole to kill it. I was so mad over this, I spend months archiving all that data and now I had no easy way to transfer it nor did I want to stay with them since they clearly don't respect their customers nor honor what they advertised.

The second one to bite me was Microsoft. Again, they lured me in with the promise of unlimited storage along with licenses to Office 365. Again, the price was reasonable ($100 a year for 5 Office 365 licenses along with individual storage for up to 5 accounts). I signed up, got my data moved to them and then a year later they, too, decided to ditch their unlimited plan for 1TB. At least they gave me almost a year to figure out what to do with my data that exceeded the 1TB without penalty (again, I had about 3-4TB of data, mostly photos). I ended up staying with them because of the 5 account/license deal, each with their own 1TB cloud storage, so the cost was still decent. Plus, I figured anyone else advertising unlimited storage for a reasonable fee was just going to do the same thing eventually. I'm not going to be fooled a third time.

I briefly looked at Amazon for at least storing my photos since they offer unlimited storage for at least that. But when I initially looked into it, I didn't like how they organized my photos. I organize my photos a certain way and prefer their file/folder hierarchy to remain intact. However, Amazon's storage decided it wanted to do their own thing and grouped my photos how they saw fit regardless of my folder structure. Since I wanted it as a to mirror how I have them setup in my Lightroom, this was unacceptable for me. I can't say if Amazon has changed this or not, but it was enough to not warrant my interest in it.
 
chenw said:
At least HDDs won't bait and Switch....
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No, they just die on you. So better buy multiple drives and have at least a RAID 1 setup. On top of that, most people are only able to keep their storage local (no offsite to keep it online at). So if your home goes up in flames, so does your backup. You could also buy even more drives and invest in a safety deposit box and do regular rotations of one of the mirrors via sneaker-net, but by that point there is no cost savings in the practice versus investing in encrypted cloud storage. Plus, you may end up sacrificing how up to date your backups are based on how many copies you are able to maintain and the frequency of your drive rotation.

Over 9 years ago at a small employee owned company I used to work for, we used the safety deposit box method. We had at least 5 hard drives with 4 of them remaining offsite in a safety deposit box. Each drive represented one week's worth of backups. We would make daily and weekly backups and rotate the onsite drive to the safety deposit box on a weekly basis. So we would have at least 4 weeks worth of backups stored offsite and also managed to avoid single points of failure if a drive failed. So in a worst case scenario we would only lose about a week's worth of data unless both our building and the bank went up in flames at the same time, which was very unlikely. From a corporate standpoint, this was pretty cheap to do considering the other options. For a homeowner it's not as cost effective, nor as convienent, as the alternatives.
 
I really hope this doesn't find its way to Backblaze. Verizon will get pissy if I have to upload 17TB all over again. That is if there even is anyone left that would support such a backup.
 
It's hard to upload a terabyte. Smart move by Amazon. Trick people to invest the time of upload, and then bait and switch. Lord knows bezos doesn't have enough money to put food on the table.
 
People say unlimited in general is ending, but here I am with 30TB on CrashPlan and they have been offering their unlimited backup service for over a decade so far without changing their policy.
 
VirtualMirage said:
No, they just die on you. So better buy multiple drives and have at least a RAID 1 setup. On top of that, most people are only able to keep their storage local (no offsite to keep it online at). So if your home goes up in flames, so does your backup. You could also buy even more drives and invest in a safety deposit box and do regular rotations of one of the mirrors via sneaker-net, but by that point there is no cost savings in the practice versus investing in encrypted cloud storage. Plus, you may end up sacrificing how up to date your backups are based on how many copies you are able to maintain and the frequency of your drive rotation.

Over 9 years ago at a small employee owned company I used to work for, we used the safety deposit box method. We had at least 5 hard drives with 4 of them remaining offsite in a safety deposit box. Each drive represented one week's worth of backups. We would make daily and weekly backups and rotate the onsite drive to the safety deposit box on a weekly basis. So we would have at least 4 weeks worth of backups stored offsite and also managed to avoid single points of failure if a drive failed. So in a worst case scenario we would only lose about a week's worth of data unless both our building and the bank went up in flames at the same time, which was very unlikely. From a corporate standpoint, this was pretty cheap to do considering the other options. For a homeowner it's not as cost effective, nor as convienent, as the alternatives.
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Yea but you have bigger problems than you computer files if your whole house goes up in flames. Its just crappy that companies pull this BS and make you pay more after they get you in the door.
 
At that price you can buy a full VPS on Amazon Lightsail and have truly private cloud, with compute as well as storage.
 
c_porter said:
Unlimited tech anything never lasts. People come out of the woodwork to use ridiculous quantites of the service because they can.
Click to expand...

This.
Free stuff is always overused/abused. Even going back to biblical times, when there was a shared pasture available, farmers would over graze the shared area to the point of damaging it, before using their own grazing land.


I guess this means the 90+ TB of data I have at the office would be too expensive to backup on-line :eek:
 
SomeoneElse said:
Yea but you have bigger problems than you computer files if your whole house goes up in flames. Its just crappy that companies pull this BS and make you pay more after they get you in the door.
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Well, while I would have bigger problems if my whole house went up in flames, at least I have homeowners insurance to replace the home and my belongings. But unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to replace my data.
 
I've stuck with Onedrive for the simple reason that it comes with the latest version of MSOffice (5 copies) and comes on every Win10 install I do. I can put a new build together, load windows, then let Onedrive update and pull down all my new PC startup files (i.e. all the apps and files I put on every machine) from the cloud right onto the machine. I can also put all the latest mobo/GPU drivers on the OneDrive on another machine and when I startup the new PC build, all the drivers for it are pulled down as well.
 
Nice bait and switch. Get people to upload all their crap then pull the rug from under them. Pay or lose everything you spent tons of time uploading.
 
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c_porter said:
Unlimited tech anything never lasts. People come out of the woodwork to use ridiculous quantites of the service because they can.
Click to expand...

You do understand we are at the very bottom of the barrel regarding compute and storage right? If you gave me a Terahertz computer and a several thousand terabytes of storage, i could use it all, right now and ask for more. Its not that im greedy or gluttonous, its that more power gives more function. Our computers today are still incredibly primitive so bumping into limits isnt really a sign of irresponsible computing. Sent from my 7700k/1080ti machine.
 
nutzo said:
This.
Free stuff is always overused/abused. Even going back to biblical times, when there was a shared pasture available, farmers would over graze the shared area to the point of damaging it, before using their own grazing land.


I guess this means the 90+ TB of data I have at the office would be too expensive to backup on-line :eek:
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It's called Tragedy of the Commons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
 
c_porter said:
Unlimited tech anything never lasts. People come out of the woodwork to use ridiculous quantites of the service because they can.

Not just tech, unlimited anything, really. Back when I worked in a ~1500 person office, the company would occassionally get rid of old stuff like chairs, laptop bags, bknders/office supplies, etc. Hundreds of identical items would be placed in one of the entrance lobbies for staff to take. Then some scientist on staff started pulling up rented trucks at 5am to take it all away to hoard somewhere, so they had to put security on the stuff and make people only take a couple. The best part was the guy was mad that they wouldn't let him have it all.
Click to expand...

Gotta love those people....
 
Has Amazon released a reason why? I didn't see one when I glanced over the article.

I wonder if it'll be similar to Comcast's reason for capping data: "The average user goes nowhere near that amount!"
 
Capping data makes money cause they find demand. If there are people willing to pay more for going over cap. Then caps will stay.
 
WorldExclusive said:
Edit, I see photo unlimited. Well if they'll still take my RAW files, it's ok but it's time to load back on HDDs.
But I also keep video files there. I'll keep my plan until it expires and not renew.
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Well this sucks. I primarily just use my Amazon cloud drive for photo/video storage, BUT they don't count RAW files and video files toward your free uploads. So those types of files get counted in the amount of data you are using. I guess I'll have to find a different cloud provider for backup.
 
Schmave said:
Well this sucks. I primarily just use my Amazon cloud drive for photo/video storage, BUT they don't count RAW files and video files toward your free uploads. So those types of files get counted in the amount of data you are using. I guess I'll have to find a different cloud provider for backup.
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Are you sure about this?

Everywhere I have looked on Amazon states that RAW files are identified and count as photos so long as the RAW file type is supported. There is an partial exception where they mention with some RAW file types, such as Sony's ARW, that the RAW file is supported but image preview is unavailable.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201634590

and

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201649930

Their list of cameras is a bit outdated, but I know that more than those listed are supported. I know ARW files worked when I was giving Amazon a brief try and determined that I didn't like how they organized the files.

Now as for videos, I think they limit it to 5GB.
 
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VirtualMirage said:
Are you sure about this?

Everywhere I have looked on Amazon states that RAW files are identified and count as photos so long as the RAW file type is supported. There is an partial exception where they mention with some RAW file types, such as Sony's ARW, that the RAW file is supported but image preview is unavailable.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201634590

and

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201649930

Their list of cameras is a bit outdated, but I know that more than those listed are supported. I know ARW files worked when I was giving Amazon a brief try and determined that I didn't like how they organized the files.

Now as for videos, I think they limit it to 5GB.
Click to expand...

Yes, they say that RAW files are identified as photos, but when I started using Amazon cloud drive the RAW files from my camera (Canon 70D) were not counted as photos but instead counted toward my storage quota. I think it depends on the camera that produced the RAW file. Maybe like the cloud drive uploader, their RAW file detection is half-assed.
 
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