In a somewhat unwelcome late Christmas present, Amazon has slipped an end-of-life notice for its Amazon Drive cloud storage service.
The platform is being supplanted by Amazon Photos, an almost identical cloud storage service, but one that offers less value to users, only allowing uploads of video and photo content, rather than just, er, files.
As threatened in 2022, the switchover happened on New Year’s Eve 2023, and as How to Geek attests, this means that although the Amazon Drive interface has now gone to live on a farm, files uploaded before the closure remain accessible – and, crucially, downloadable.
A guide to retrieving your Amazon Drive files
It's not all bad news though - as users will be able to find their migrated files in the ‘Folders’ section of the Amazon Drive app.
Said section might not be well-organized: Drive also stored digital purchases and files sent remotely to Kindles you’ll probably find that Anne Rice novel your ex-wife bought you in 2012 that you had to pretend was high-falutin’ literature.
However, a Christmas miracle is yet upon us: Amazon will apparently let you keep these files forever. That’s a promise from an evil corporation, so, naturally, could all change at any point. It’s no immaculate conception, more King Herod throwing his weight around, so we’d recommend retrieving any files you think you might like to.
Migrating to a new cloud storage provider
As it stands, Amazon Photos is a strange beast: a photo storage service aimed more at consumers looking to preserve holiday snaps than enterprises looking to keep swathes of potentially sensitive data secure. If you’re a business owner, we’d strongly suggest migrating to another cloud backup offering.
There are that many to choose from, with so different specialties (Amazon may have long since abandoned unlimited cloud storage, but other providers are happy to oblige) that it’s impossible to recommend just one, or even a handful of providers. So, we’ll make suggestions and you can make the decision.
