In a somewhat unpleasant late Christmas present, Amazon has sent out an end-of-life notice for its Amazon Drive cloud storage service.
The platform is being replaced by Amazon Photos, a nearly identical cloud storage service, but one that offers less value to users and only allows you to upload video and photo content, rather than just files.
As threatened in 2022, the change occurred on New Year’s Eve 2023 and, as How to Geek attests, this means that although the Amazon Drive interface has now been installed in a farm, files uploaded before the shutdown are still being accessible and, most importantly, downloadable.
A guide to recover your files from Amazon Drive
It’s not all bad news, however, as users will be able to find their migrated files in the “Folders” section of the Amazon Drive app.
Such a section may 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-sounding literature.
However, a Christmas miracle is still looming: Amazon will apparently let you keep these files forever. That’s a promise from an evil corporation, so naturally everything could change at any moment. It’s not an immaculate conception, but rather King Herod doing his best, so we recommend recovering any files he thinks you would like.
Migrate 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 vacation snaps than at businesses looking to keep large amounts of potentially sensitive data secure. If you are a business owner, we highly recommend migrating to another cloud backup offering.
There are so many to choose from, with such different specialties (Amazon may have long ago abandoned unlimited cloud storage, but other providers are happy to do so) that it’s impossible to recommend just one, or even a handful of providers. So we will make suggestions and you can make the decision.
