Amazon launches Amazon Cloud Drive – is this a DropBox killer?
Amazon have just launched their cloud-based storage locker, Amazon Cloud Drive. It’s being widely reported as competition for Apple’s supposedly up-and-coming music locker service, but the Amazon offering goes beyond music – it’ll let you store videos, photos and documents as well as music. You get 5Gb for starters, and if you buy any Amazon MP3 album you get upgraded to 20Gb for free (and Amazon purchases don’t count towards your 20Gb, which is nice).
Amazon are also providing a “Cloud player” to play your music over the web and on Android devices – either they couldn’t get an Apple app approved, or they didn’t bother submitting one after Apple’s recent Kindle-killing attempts, but there’s no mention of an iOS app.
Could this be a DropBox killer? Right now, no – DropBox (and other services like SugarSync) have a client application which sits on your computer and backs up your files in the background; Amazon aren’t offering this at the moment. But as a manual storage service, that 5Gb - upgradable to 20Gb for less than the other services charge – is very tempting.
But I’m still not convinced by these cloud services. First, 5Gb isn’t that big, and I suspect most people’s MP3 collections are larger than that by now. 20Gb is better, but when phones are coming with 32Gb and portable MP3 players are going up to 160Gb (with household ones 500Gb and upwards) it’s still only going to hold part of a lot of people’s collections. If you can fit all your music onto your phone – which will work anywhere – why would you deliberately store your music onto an internet server which you can only access when you are at a computer, or on an Android phone with good enough reception? You won’t have access when you’re on the underground, on a plane, in the middle of nowhere…
As a backup solution, however, it’s not bad. It’d be worth backing up your iTunes purchased music too (since you can redownload Apps for free but not music), but as a music streaming service, I don’t see the point; it’s too limiting and your normal phone / MP3 player will do the job much more successfully.
Personally for backing up photos, etc. I use Microsoft’s Skydrive which gives you 25GB for free although there is currently no option to expand this.
For synced folders I prefer Microsoft’s Mesh client (5GB of free space) over Dropbox (although I use both) as I can specify which folders I want to sync rather than stuff everything into one big folder.
The Amazon offering might be interesting if they offered a local client to do syncing but for just a manually uploaded folder of stuff there are better options out there.
At the moment there’s no sign of a Dropbox-style Amazon client, and they’re really promoting it as a music locker / streaming service; for now I think they’ll stay away from the syncing approach. You’re quite right that there are better options out there – the main strength of this service is the music streaming, and even that’s not that great. But hey – free gigs.
Skydrive is one of the better services out there, but I don’t see it talked about that often. Mind you, that could just be because I’m now more of a Mac person, and we can’t access these services at work so it’s off the radar. I’ve been using Mozy for my cloud backups – decent infrastructure behind it (EMC) and decent price (£5 a month unlimited). But until we’ve got decent upload speeds to match, all these cloud storage services are of limited use…
And by the way – nice to see someone else with the same approach to email addresses as me! I always just get strange looks when I try and explain it to people…