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Amazon Cloud Drive Review

If you are presently looking for a good place to store out your favorite music, photographs, videos, Kindle documents and files, then you should definitely check out our Amazon Cloud Drive review. This service comes at very competitive prices, and is intended for personal use, and is best suited for those who are already Amazon customers. It doesn’t support business or enterprise needs. However, as far as personal cloud storage services go, the Amazon Drive service is perhaps one of the most flexible and easy to use. Plus, Amazon Drive has now added the syncing function, and it actually manages the process better than other cloud storage providers.

In our Amazon Drive review, we will discuss the features of this cloud storage service, as well as  the Amazon driving pricing plans. Read on to see if it’s truly worth investing in the Amazon Drive service.

Amazon Drive – General Info

The Amazon Drive, formerly named Amazon Cloud Drive, is a cloud-based backup and restoration service, which features unlimited cloud storage for photos, and up to 5 GB of backup space for the rest of your stuff if you choose to subscribe to a basic account.

With the Amazon Drive, you will be able to perform the following actions:

  • Back up your files to the cloud or local drive;
  • Restore files from the cloud using either the Web-based platform or the desktop manager;
  • Manage your photos and videos;
  • Preview photos or videos;
  • Organize them using the integrated timeline function;
  • Use the free Prime Photos and Amazon Drive apps for Apple, Android, Mac and Windows, to share or access your files on the go;
  • Upload photos, videos, files and more on all your devices;

As you can see, compared to other cloud-based services which are more versatile, Amazon Drive revolves more around the photo/video side.

Amazon Cloud Drive Plans and Pricing

As far as pricing is concerned, Amazon Drive offers two types of pricing plans: a basic one with unlimited photo storage plus 5 GB of additional space for video and other files, and a pro one.

Below you will find a table detailing the Amazon Drive pricing, and what you get for each of the two Amazon Cloud storage paying plans:

PlanPriceStorage AllotmentFeatures
100 GB Amazon Digital Storage Plan$11.99 per year100 GB storage for files, music, photos, videosUpload Files from PC, Phone, Tablet, and Fire DeviceBackup and view view your content from your tablet, phone, PC using the Amazon Drive or Amazon Prime Photos appsAmazon security
1 TB Amazon Digital Storage Plan$59.99 per year1 TB Photo, Video and File StorageSame features as above

Amazon Cloud Drive In-Depth Review

In the following sections, we will provide an in-depth Amazon Cloud Drive review. We will look at the most important features of the Amazon Drive service. We will also compare it with other, similar services, to see how it fares. Hopefully, these sections of our Amazon Drive review will help you make an informed decision when it comes to choosing a cloud storage service.

File Backup

There are two main ways in which you can use the Amazon Drive service to backup your files. You can use either the Web app or the desktop app. Both have a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to easily copy files from your computer to your Amazon cloud account.

Amazon Cloud Drive Review

You can also install the Amazon Drive Cloud app on your mobile device. You can use it only to back up photos and other images currently on your mobile device. The mobile app has an automatic Amazon Cloud Drive sync function, that is now included in the desktop app too, thanks to recent updates. With their Whispersync function for Kindle and Fire devices, you can sync to Amazon Cloud Drive the bookmarks, highlights, and notes from any Kindle format document. This includes all documents created on any of the devices registered to the Amazon account.

File Restoration

As part of our Amazon Cloud Drive review, we’ve tried to retrieve some of the files (mainly photos) uploaded to the Cloud. From what we can figure out, restoration is as fast and simple as uploading.

Both Amazon Cloud apps have a button that allows you to instantly download all of the files you had on the cloud if you need to restore everything quickly. You can also restore individual files and folders, by dragging them back from your Amazon Cloud Drive folder.

Security

Amazon Cloud Drive uses pretty basic security measures to protect your files, namely a password and a sign-in ID. You can sign in to your Amazon Cloud Drive account using your Amazon account as well. If you are wondering how secure is Amazon cloud storage, you should know that these measures are enough for personal use, but not for business use.

The only security measure that Amazon Drive lacks and would have been useful is some sort of password encryption possibility when creating links to your files. When you share a link, you can’t really control who has access to the files.

Other Features

The Amazon Drive service seems to be quite simplistic. This makes it very easy to use and reliable. However, it lacks certain features that would have been very useful. Amazon Drive does now support file syncing on its web and desktop apps. However, this does not mean it also has a complete file versioning feature. It allows you to recover deleted files, but it does not let you choose which version of the file you recover. The mobile app also supports file syncing for images, videos and Kindle documents.

The Amazon Drive allows you to browse easily through your picture/video collection using a comprehensible timeline-like system, just like your smartphone uses.

It also integrates quite well with other Amazon services. When you buy music via Amazon, it will be automatically stored in your Amazon Drive Cloud storage, so you can easily access from anywhere, without having to fill up space on your mobile devices.

Amazon Cloud Drive – Pros and Cons

In this section of our Amazon Cloud Drive review, we will list the main pros and cons of this service. We’ve included on this list most of the points we’ve already discussed at length in our Amazon Cloud review.

Pros:

  • Easy to use and to deploy;
  • Great cross-platform compatibility;
  • Unlimited storage for photos;
  • Works great with Amazon Prime;
  • Superior upload/download speeds;

Cons:

  • Prohibitive desktop application;
  • No file versioning;
  • Credit card number required to set up account;
  • No collaborative tools.

Amazon Cloud Drive Alternative Options

As our Amazon Cloud Drive review highlights, Amazon Drive is a basic cloud storage service, ideal for home use. The first main alternative that comes to mind is Dropbox. Although Amazon Drive now has syncing functions, Dropbox still has superior file syncing. It’s also easier to control file access with Dropbox. On the other hand, if you’re interested in unlimited storage space, Amazon Cloud Drive is a smarter choice, since it’s cheaper than Dropbox overall. You can read more about the pros and cons of using Dropbox in our review.

When it comes to file sharing and collaboration tools, Google Drive is a much more flexible alternative. Amazon Drive does not feature any collaboration tools, and it has a very basic file sharing system.

SpiderOak is also a solid alternative to Amazon Drive. It has many of the collaboration features that Amazon Drive lacks and more diverse pricing plans. However, SpiderOak is geared more towards businesses, rather than personal use, as you’ve come to see in our SpiderOak review.

Our Verdict

To conclude our Amazon Cloud Drive review article, we have to say that we were a bit disappointed by this cloud-based service. It has a lot of nice pics and clips management functions like the timeline option, and the camera roll backup feature.

However, when it comes to storing other types of files, there are better options out there. We would recommend using Amazon Drive mainly if you are a frequent Amazon customer, as the integration does provide Amazon clients with some benefits.

We’d like to hear your opinion. Is there anything we left out from our Amazon Cloud Drive review? What do you think about this cloud service?

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