Amazon Drive towards the terminus: switch-off at the end of next year

Perhaps not everyone knows this, but as with Amazon Photos and Google Photos there is an alternative developed by Jeff Bezos’ company to the Google Drive cloud storage service: it is simply called Amazon Drive. It was not very successful, and so came the official announcement of its closure. The definitive shutdown of the servers will take place on December 31, 2023; in short, there is still a lot of time to run for cover.

In its official note (just follow the SOURCE link at the bottom of the article), Amazon explains that the shutdown of Drive is motivated by the desire to concentrate all resources in the development of Photos “to guarantee customers a dedicated solution for storing photos and videos”. According to the press release, there will be no automated tools for transferring and saving data: you will need to go to the service website (i.e. amazon.com/clouddrive) and manually choose files and folders to keep. However, photos and videos will be automatically transferred to Amazon Photos – or rather, it is a procedure that the service already completes “ex officio”. While we’re at it, it’s worth mentioning that for Prime subscribers Amazon Photos offers unlimited photo storage without compression, but only photos, not videos. For those there are 5 GB for free, then you have to buy separate storage.

For those with a very large collection of files, it can be a good solution to use the official apps for desktop or mobile. These apps will remain online until the service is closed, however they will no longer receive even security updates. Users who have purchased a premium plan (Amazon Drive offers 5GB free to everyone) can choose to cancel it early; there is a refund. which is automatically calculated during the procedure.

The news comes just a few hours after the financial report for the second quarter of the year. Things went well and badly, in the sense that the platform itself grew in turnover and customer demand, but net profits suffered from the sudden and large expansion of the logistics infrastructure during the pandemic, and that now remains at least partially unused, and the investment in the electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian. It makes sense to think that, in addition to important measures like the price increase for the Prime service, the company is trying to rationalize their offer of services by cutting any dry branches.