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Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft with Unlimited Cloud Drive Storage
- TorKlingberg 12y agoThe other tech giants (Google, Microsoft, Apple) already have consumer cloud storage services, so I am not surprised to see Amazon launching one too. Now I just hope there will be a standard for mobile apps to use cloud storage, to get out of this swamp with each app integrating with storage services individually.
- saturdaysaint 12y agoThis isn't a new service - the cheap/unlimited pricing is what's new.
- JamesBaxter 12y agoCould Amazon put the squeeze on Dropbox by raising the price of S3? Would that be a shot in the foot due to a reduction in sales for S3 but worth it to get into cloud storage?
- imaginenore 12y agoI would be surprised if Dropbox hasn't looked at the alternatives. S3 is pretty expensive as is.
- davidu 12y agoThere is no way Dropbox is paying stock S3 pricing.
- dhimes 12y agoMaybe dropbox should get an account and use it as the storage for their service. :)
- 727374 12y agoUnlikely for a bunch of reasons. 1) Amazon has a history of competing fairly with customers (e.g. Netflix) and wouldn't want to ruin its reputation in that regard 2) Big customers like dropbox make S3 better (power users + increased economies of scale 3) Raising the price of S3 would risk Dropbox shifting to another cloud provider with no guarantee that customers would shift to Amazon storage
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- EA 12y agoUnlimited Everything Plan (free 3-month trial, then $59.99 per year–equivalent of less than $5 per month): Store an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music in Cloud Drive.
- salemh 12y agoThoughts on security or storing sensitive stuffs (finance, tax forms, etc.). Though I suppose my question goes for all of the cloud services (Google Drive, Drop Box), which, in my uneducated opinion is "be careful / encrypt it."
- cschneid 12y agoI keep tax and similar docs on dropbox inside a truecrypt encrypted disk. Suitable level of security for my needs, and I like that its synced across a few systems (including one that is separately backed up).
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- cwyers 12y agoI don't see how Dropbox wins this. Dropbox isn't going to be able to beat Amazon on price reselling Amazon's own cloud. Dropbox doesn't have any complements, like Google does with Google Docs and Gmail and Android or Microsoft has with Windows and Office or Amazon has with their MP3 marketplace and their Fire devices. It's the whole Jobs thing with 'you're a feature, not a product.'
- artursapek 12y agoIs Dropbox working on moving to its own hardware? It seems like being bound to S3 must be a big business risk for them.
- minimaxir 12y agoDropbox's business strategies (Carousel) and acquisitions ("Dropbox for Music", "Dropbox for Documents") make it seem like Dropbox is opting for diversity instead of opting for efficiency, that could be passed down to the end-user with lower prices.
- cwyers 12y agoAnd that's probably wise -- it's not like the markup on S3 is so huge that it's an obvious big win to move off it once you consider the size of the up-front investment to build up a similarly featured, distributed and redundant cloud storage system of their own. Diversification is a good idea for them, I just think it's a very low probability of success.
- vidarh 12y agoUnless they have substantial discounts over the public S3 prices (which is certainly possible - even likely), you can cut 50% or more off the S3 costs very easily. The AWS markups are crazy high. You can even save substantial money over "pure" S3 just by proxying and caching requests for the most heavily trafficked objects somewhere with lower bandwidth costs.
- eropple 12y agoThis looks promising, down the line, to replace Dropbox (which I use for things I don't care about or don't need to collaborage on--SpiderOak Hive for everything else). But I think I want to see it exist for some length of time before jumping on it.
- simplexion 12y agoI got the Spideroak unlimited deal when that existed. I don't think I will be changing anytime soon. The client-side encryption is greatness and makes the cost very easy to live with.
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- ivank 12y ago"We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of the Service at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Service or harms our interests or those of another user of the Service." http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201376540&ref_=cd_tou_fp&?ref_=cd_unlimited_tou http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
- 300bps 12y agoI currently pay about $120 per year for 1 TB of storage through Google Drive. I use about 850 GB of that. After using all the various popular cloud drive services, I can say this isn't about $ per GB anymore. $120 per year for 1 TB is such a low amount of money that it becomes meaningless. The next hurdle they need to overcome is sync speed. When you're dealing with that much data (especially when made up of many tiny files like JPGs) it becomes a significant engineering challenge. The sync speed with some services can slow to a crawl. In my own use, Google Drive and DropBox have been the best. OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) was unusable at certain file counts. I haven't tried Amazon though. I would give it a shot if I go over the 1 TB mark but would probably not try it just to try to save $60 per year.
- lettergram 12y agoFYI, I get 1 TB storage through dropbox for $99
- tacos 12y agoMicrosoft offers 1 TB storage through OneDrive for $69.99/yr -- and it comes with Microsoft Office apps for PC, Mac, Android and iOS. I have a soft spot for Dropbox, but it's really just a matter of who buys them for what price now. They're done.
- sz4kerto 12y agoAnecdotal, but I just synced >10k files from OneDrive to the local drive, and the sync saturated my internet connection (100 Mbit). (On Windows 10.)
- tacos 12y agoOneDrive has been a mess: "Prior to Windows 8.1, we had two sync experiences. One used on Windows 7/8/Mac to connect to the consumer service, and a second sync engine to connect to the commercial service (OneDrive for Business). In Windows 8.1 we introduced a third sync engine..." This is Chris Jones, super smart guy, long-time vet of Microsoft, and ... indicative of the kind of incredibly stupid shit only Microsoft can pull off. Bonus points for the phrase "sync experiences" which indicates smart-dude-weak-thinking at a legendary level. Sinofskyesque. In the blog post he sort of admits the fuckup. Sort of. But who cares. It's March and things already kicking ass on Mac, finally. After Windows 10 ships it'll be fine. Five years late, but fine. Not like Dropbox got their nonsense figured out with the long and generous head start. And not like Apple's done any better, either.
- SilasX 12y agoIsn't this just begging people to find the actual limits? Couldn't Dropbox cut their own costs by using the unlimited service, and then make money on offering better service? Would amazon just throttle them in response, or ...? Edit; ivank found the catch, a few minutes before I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908
- Aissen 12y agoOVH tried to do that with their Hubic service, and people were just abusing the limits, sending in data from multiple machines 24/7 (https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ovh.com%2Ffr%2Fa895.hubic_une_premiere_annee_epique&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev... ) . They now limit at 10TB for the old "unlimited" price. This might explain this clause: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269908
- Splendor 12y agoI would feel better about Amazon's offering if they were more transparent regarding government requests. According to the EFF[0] Amazon doesn't tells users about government data requests or publish transparency reports. [0]: https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2014 https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2014
- systemtheory 12y agono doubt. amazon <heart> government.[0] [0]http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/how-cia-partnered-amazon-and-changed-intelligence/88555/ http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/how-cia-partner...
- Fastidious 12y agoI have not played with Amazon Cloud Drive yet, does it allows for selective synchronization?
- bradfa 12y agoIs it a folder? Dropbox is a folder. Everyone in my family understands "put things in this folder, they sync automatically." I want that but at this price!
- jforman 12y agoIt is not a folder. Once I realized this I uninstalled. I don't want to redownload files every time I need to work on them.
- natch 12y agoIt seems I want the opposite. I don't want to have the files on my local machine. I want storage that is bigger than what my local machine has. Hopefully at least one of us will get what we want from this.
- Fastidious 12y agoIt doesn't seems to be. I just installed it. Under OS X you get a window to which you can drag and drop files and directories, and you can download files and directories from your Cloud Drive, but not synchronization, selective or otherwise. That makes it a limping service for me.
- JohnTHaller 12y agoIt likely won't be. Amazon is pretty bad at software.
- jscheel 12y agoThe photo side could be good for my phone's photos, but not for my real photography. I have to have sync for photos that I am actually going to do work on.
- movingahead 12y agoAll cloud storage services offer unlimited storage in one form or another. It will be interesting to see who comes up with the most seamless solution for managing limited on device memory storage with unlimited storage on the cloud. Users may also want different files to be synced on different devices. I have only used Dropbox among all of these services, and its current manual Selective Sync is a clumsy way to manage data.
- Fastidious 12y agoI do not think Amazon is going after Dropbox, Google and Microsoft with this, as the article title implies. Thus far, Amazon is offering a different service: Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive all synchronize your files (selective or all) Amazon's Cloud Drive does not.
- hashmymustache 12y agoDoes any service allow me to stop syncing node_modules folders?
- cnt0 12y agoHi, On MEO Cloud (https://meocloud.pt/downloads https://meocloud.pt/downloads), you can create a .cloudignore file in the root of the main sync folder. The syntax is the same as .gitignore files. (http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore). Cheers.
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- edwintorok 12y agohow about bandwidth bills? is there a flat fee for those?
- magic5227 12y agoIt seems many people here commenting haven't tried it. It has no sync! The online interface is awful! This is currently such a bad product that its not likely to be a threat to any existing solution. Try signing up and seeing it for yourself. You will neither be able to sync or upload a lot of content, nor use it once uploaded given the poor online interface.
- astrocat 12y agoMight want to check some facts here. There is an Amazon Cloud Drive app for Windows and Mac that does syncing. It's not as advanced as Dropbox but it's about on par with the Google Drive app. Their online interface isn't terrible either - it's actually surprisingly modern for an Amazon product. There's actually two views - one for files and one for photos (just like Dropbox and Carousel). Again the file browser is about as bare bones as it gets without document preview etc, but the Cloud Drive Photos view is pretty decent. Dropbox is miles ahead of Amazon in their UI and other features, but I think for many very basic users, Amazon's offering will be sufficient for simple backup/sync operations.
- magic5227 12y agoFYI their FAQ says the sync is "old" and the new tool which will be updated is drop to upload only. Also, their file interface is far from modern. You can't drag and drop, right click to share, anything expected from all of their competitors.
- sandis 12y agoCould work out fine as an upload-and-forget solution. I have a bunch of stuff I don't need to access often (if ever) and certainly don't want to keep local copies of. Currently using S3 and Glacier for that, but Cloud Drive might just fit the bill.
- rwhitman 12y agoI've periodically tried the consumer amazon cloud drive every few months or so since it's popped up on my radar and every time I get frustrated and remove it. Dropbox may be reselling me the same storage at 200% markup but the interface is effortless, the software is very hard to break even with a large number of collaborators and group folders, it has a nice media browser, the public sharing abilities are top notch etc. Amazon could offer to pay me to use their Cloud Drive product and I still would not use it
- PlzSnow 12y agoAmazon Cloud Drive is useless because it has no synchronization. You need to manually upload and download files whenever they change. Useless!
- shanemhansen 12y agoThis strikes me as being somewhat similar to the historic relationship between auto makers and dealers. Before dealer protection laws (that we now hate so much), an auto maker could really just put any dealer out of business once the dealer had shown that there was a viable market in that area. It's a few years later and now we have several businesses who's business model is essentially reselling amazon services (s3), and once they've shown it's a viable business (dropbox) we can expect amazon to come in and undercut them. There are two factors that might prevent amazon from being too successful in the consumer storage area. 1. Dropbox's UI, apps, and filesystem integration are both very well designed and pretty technically complex. It might seem trivial to design something as good, but I promise you it's not. 2. Consumer storage pricing is in a race to the bottom, but consumer storage volume is increasing exponentially. Once people start uploading all their home videos to this service, will amazon be able to afford to run this business unit?
- elb0w 12y agoI wonder how much it would hurt gmail if amazon offered their own version.
- tracker1 12y agoI'd actually like something more like thunderbird/gmail for multiple accounts, where the storage/client is mine, but the imap accounts it connects to are on other services, with multiple account support...
- sanmon3186 12y agoNot sure what would have gone in deciding that they don't need anything between 5GB and unlimited.
- liyanage 12y agoI love the Dropbox service, but if Amazon will provide iOS and Mac clients that work well and the Mac client turns out to be less of a CPU hog than the awful Dropbox Mac client, I'll switch right away. Dropbox is constantly the second highest average energy user over the last 8 hours on my laptop, impacting battery life. It shows up high on the CPU usage list all the time.
- rckclmbr 12y agoI'm actually upset by this -- I'm on the $10/year for 20gb plan (I use unlimited photos, the 20gb are just home videos). I'm sure Amazon figured there would be a few people like me who wouldn't like this, but it still sucks.
- akrymski 12y ago"Unlimited" should be banned from advertising slogans. It's like an "all you can eat" buffet that kicks out the customers that eat too much. It's a trick that companies employ because nobody reads their TOCs that let them kick out power users. It's misleading advertising. Why not promise people 100TB of storage? Because then you'd actually have to live up to your promises. Since living up to promises of "unlimited" data isn't feasible, this strategy should be banned. Same goes for Yahoo! Mail and their "unlimited" storage.
- magic5227 12y agoFYI everyone here, this is not even sync. It's a drag and drop to upload applet :) http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201376690 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... "Note: The Cloud Drive Sync application (formerly, the "Cloud Drive desktop application") is no longer available for download. If you already have the application installed on your computer, you can continue to use it. However, if you uninstall the application, you won't be able to reinstall it from the website."
- kapitalx 12y agoI tried using the unlimited photos service with my prime account and auto-phone-photo-backup service. It works great when uploading or browsing your photos online, but once you go to download your photos, it's one by one.
- tomjen3 12y agoSad. I would personally love to mount a drive so that I didn't have to have nearly 100gb .raw files on my laptop but could still access them any time. That thing is just useless for any purpose.
- magic5227 12y agoAgree 100% If they had selective sync with storage at that price, it would be a game changer.
- zkhalique 12y agoWell the takeaway from me as a Prime customer is now I can back up almost all my photos to the cloud (hi NSA!) ... in fact if there was a convenient app on my iPhone to automatically sync it, I'd sign up. Maybe in the future, Amazon will offer some cool services for tagging and searching my photos. Makes everyone suddenly want to become a high-res DSLR fanatic. What I see is that Amazon is simply trying to maximize the power of Bundling. It's all about that Prime, 'bout that Prime, no limit. (Except the unofficial one which only a few people will run into, but the gamble is that the positive PR will attract more customers than the negative PR. Of course, they're also attracting a lawsuit from other companies. I don't know what they're smoking.
- geoka9 12y ago"Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up." Моst people in the US and Canada have highly asymmetrical Internet connections, so uploading gigabytes of accumulated media is hardly an enticing proposition. I wonder if that's an important factor of why the cloud providers are so willing to offer "unlimited" storage. If it was Eastern Europe, on the other hand, they'd probably be swamped with data in days, if not hours.
- ghaff 12y agoI suspect it's one factor--in addition to the fact that unlimited, like free, sounds really good in marketing copy to most people. As a data point, I think it took me something like 3 months to do my initial 1.3TB or so backup to Backblaze. So somewhere in the few TB range is probably going to be the practical maximum for most consumers.
- borgia 12y agoI don't trust Amazon from a privacy point of view so I'm certainly not going to be hosting private files on their servers. I like Dropbox because it does basically one thing and does it well. I don't need to edit docs, collaborate, etc. with it - I've Google Drive for those purposes - but it suits me perfectly for my core backup requirements and at a price I'm not too bothered by.
- SXX 12y agoIf you using Dropbox you already host your private files on Amazon S3 servers. You better use client-side encryption if you want to keep your files safe.
- samx18 12y agoStill cannot share folders on AWS Cloud Drive :(
- xxcode 12y agoI just looked at the Box stock. Google Finance says institutional ownership of 0%. Never seen something like this before - perhaps gFinance has buggy data or else the smart money is not on Box. Perhaps similar story on Dropbox. Not sure when their IPO is, but I hear the rumblings of it.
- Cookingboy 12y agoI think vast majority of Box's IPO buyers were institutional investors (not counting their existing investors before the IPO). Maybe the reports are not filed yet or Google hasn't aggregated recent data.
- msoad 12y agoI have Amazon Prime yet I'm paying for Google $2/mo to keep my photos. Google+ features for photos are just awesome!
- themodelplumber 12y agoWhen you are spending almost $7B a year on shipping, and your customers are only paying $3B for said shipping, it's time to start padding the Prime features so you can take advantage of the good will when you make necessary adjustments later.
- eco 12y agoInteresting. Where'd you get those figures? I googled around a bit but came up short.
- themodelplumber 12y agoThey're in here, see 3:45. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwCcEP74Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwCcEP74Q
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- badusername 12y agoI can't see how Dropbox wouldn't end up getting crushed in this fight. Just recently, they reclaimed all the promo/referral/college storage I had, and shrunk my space from 40GB to 15GB. Pay up $10 per month or lose all your data. I shopped around, and got a $2 per month from Google Drive. The product is pretty much on parity with Dropbox on the Mac, and works exactly the same way. Yes, I'll take that 80% discount, thank you.
- cjoh 12y agoIt's mostly, right now, because Amazon's desktop software is _so_ bad. Whereas with Dropbox and Google Drive, I can simply save files to a directory on my computer and can be assured that Dropbox/Drive are uploading them automatically and keeping them in sync, with Amazon, they seem to have forgotten about Sync all together. There are files that I add to the cloud. Should I need to work on them again, then I download them from the cloud, edit them, and add them back. This workflow sucks, and it's worth paying to not have to do that.
- akfanta 12y ago> The product is pretty much on parity with Dropbox on the Mac In my experience, Dropbox is always faster and more reliable. The other big selling point of Dropbox is the wide adoption of its API. It's basically the de-facto cloud sync solution for most of the iOS/Mac app out there (some are moving to iCloud, but Dropbox is still the more reliable/popular one). If you are deep integrated in the Apple eco system, Dropbox is hands down the best you can go with.
- SXX 12y agoWhat's happen when trial access expire? Will files remain accessible without payment? I know that Google Drive don't allow to uploads until you pay for storage or remove files that above limit, but they're still available. Interesting what happen in case of Amazon.
- lucasmullens 12y ago"covering all kinds of media from videos and music through to PDF documents" Do they not just accept all files? This makes me think there's a set list of filetypes.
- selter01 12y agoOneDrive already offers unlimited storage!
- mark_l_watson 12y agoI am glad to see more competition in this space! I frequently advise non-tech family and friends to choose two cloud providers, and use them to replicate important files. I stopped being a paid Dropbox customer last year over the Condi Rice issue (otherwise, a great service) but I still use their free tier. I also pay for extra Google Drive storage, which I think is a good deal. The best deal, for my use cases however, is Office 365 home edition: my wife and I each get one terrabyte of cloud storage and up to date versions of all of the Office 365 productivity software (and the web versions are nice running Linux) -- all for $100/year. I am tempted to sign up for the new Amazon offering, but I already feel I am so well replicated: every photo I take goes automatically to Google+, OndeDrive, and Dropbox; almost all of my working files are inside of OneDrive so get synced; I created compressed archive files for projects and with date stamps save them away in Google Drive; projects stored at bitbucket and github. It will be interesting to see how well Amazon supports mobile devices and multiple operating systems. For me one of the biggest wins of cloud storage is being able to choose what is not replicated to my laptops, etc.
- natch 12y agoIs this a drive, or storage? In other words, do I have to have one corresponding drive on my system, and the storage is limited to at most the size of that one physical drive?
- prapam2 12y agoSeems very good for archival storage. But then what becomes of Glacier storage?
- ghshephard 12y agoThese "Unlimited" offers now bore me. I'd much rather they capture what the actual offer is - is it 100 GB with 50 GB/month Upload, 50 GB/month Download? 500 GB with 100 GB/month upload, 1 TB/month download? Just be honest with me and tell me what you are offering, don't play games with "Unlimited"
- rsync 12y agoIf only there was a cloud storage provider that did just that. If only they were hacker/unix focused and had been around since 2001 and even had a HN readers discount. If only ...
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- ghshephard 12y agoRsync and Tarsnap are two of the of services that are excellent in this nature. In particular, I'm almost 100% certain that if a user goes crazy, and stores 1 TB+ on Rsync, that they wouldn't even blink. Also incredibly attractive about Rsync, is that if you already have a lot of exposure to AWS, then Rsync is an awesome secondary store, as, based on my limited understanding and reading of their FAQs, their is no connection between AWS and Rsync. Should AWS drop off the face of the earth, or some exploit result in an extended data disaster, Rsync is in no way impacted.
- hakunin 12y agoI'm pretty sure you're responding to the rsync creator.
- ghshephard 12y agoAbsolutely, but he was too modest to promote himself so I, an disinterested third party did it for him.
- rsync 12y ago
- nickbauman 12y agoIt's not going after Google Drive as it has no content application offering. Google Drive has a comprehensive one: create spreadsheets and all kinds of other documents _in_ the cloud. Collaborate on those documents using apps such as Hangouts, G+, GMail.
- SXX 12y agoOh these unlimited services. Just tried to upload some files: > The file 1.zip did not upload because it is larger than 2 GB.
- SXX 12y agoUpdate. Limitation only applied to web UI: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201376710 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Though as mentioned before app not currently available. :(
- coryfklein 12y agoI don't have a lot to say about the OP, but I can say that this thread is 100% more enjoyable to read after installing the Cloud to Butt extension.
- misterjinx 12y agoThere is something very unclear to me regarding the usage of the cloud drive for kindle related stuff. I mean, until now every ebook I purchased on amazon was available on amazon cloud. Also, they offered this option to documents you sent to your device by email. How is this new cloud drive going to affect me ? They already told me in the email that the current 5 GB plan is no longer available and has been replaced with a free 3-month trial of one of the Unlimited plans. The existing documents are available to download and view but if I want to upload new files I must select one of the Unlimited plans. So no more cloud storage for kindle (of course, unless I choose to pay according to new plans) ?
- mblakele 12y agoIt looks to me like the "send to kindle" feature is broken unless you sign up for one of the free trial options. That fits with the email they sent out: "In order to upload new files you will need to pick one of the free 3-month trials". I suppose I can still move things around using dropbox, but it's not quite the same.
- sreitshamer 12y agoI'm adding support for this to Arq (my backup app) right now. Unlimited backups for $5/month with no data transfer fees sounds awesome to me!
- sidcool 12y agoAmazingly, the top comment on this post discusses philosophy of mortality, based on the ToS of corporations.