Amazon Cloud Drive Launches Unlimited Cloud Storage

Customers can choose between two convenient and affordable storage plans—Unlimited Everything or Unlimited Photos

Free 3-month trial available for customers to experience unlimited cloud storage of photos, videos, movies, music, and files

http://phx.corporate-ir.net …ol-newsArticle&ID=2028891

Now you don't have to be a member of Amazon Prime.

Uh, Oh. It looks like BackBlaze has some serious competition. Unlimited file storage for $5 a month is clearly aimed right at them.

Sounds pretty good. Amazon are super reputable and have an incredible infrastructure to back up their service.

I wonder if they have versioning on files? That would be brilliant, to prevent corruption spreading. I know they have it on their S3 service, not sure about on cloud drive.

I'm probably a borderline Luddite here, but I'm not convinced of the safety and security of the cloud... yet. Though Amazon's name behind it is a step in the right direction.

I'm trying the unlimited photo option now. We have 1TB OneDrive for Business storage, but it continually balks while uploading large volumes of files. So far Amazon looks like it's far smoother.

AWS security is superb, they have just about every security audit and certification that you can get. The real problem is generally the users not using security features that are provided - two factor authentication, encryption with custom keys, etc.

You can read up on general AWS security here. Their storage service is most likely using S3 (maybe EBS but less likely) if you want to read in more detail.

Anyone have any idea if Cloud everything unlimited is available to Canadians?

Lots like yet another consumer-level cloud service. Good as a secondary backup or as access anywhere drive. I wouldn't use as a primary backup. If you want high data integrity, redundancy, you have to pay for it.

chantu wrote in post #17498467
Lots like yet another consumer-level cloud service. Good as a secondary backup or as access anywhere drive. I wouldn't use as a primary backup. If you want high data integrity, redundancy, you have to pay for it.

What are you basing this opinion on? Amazon have about the most reliable infrastructure there is, and their cloud drive if not using S3 exactly will be using very similar infrastructure. I would trust Amazon S3/Glacier 1000 times more than I would trust a single hard drive, and Amazon Cloud by extension. I would like to see published their reliability figures and infrastructure information. I could ask an AWS contact.

Background
Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.

Scatterbrained wrote in post #17492705
Uh, Oh. It looks like BackBlaze has some serious competition. Unlimited file storage for $5 a month is clearly aimed right at them.

Not yet. The Amazon service is for personal not professional or commercial use. From the terms of use:

"1.2 Using Your Files with the Service. You may use the Service only to store, retrieve, manage, and access Your Files for personal, non-commercial purposes using the features and functionality we make available. You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to resell any part of the Service. You are solely responsible for Your Files and for complying with all applicable copyright and other laws, including import and export control laws and regulations, and with the terms of any licenses or agreements to which you are bound. You must ensure that Your Files are free from any malware, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms, or other malicious or harmful code. "

tim wrote in post #17498505
What are you basing this opinion on? Amazon have about the most reliable infrastructure there is, and their cloud drive if not using S3 exactly will be using very similar infrastructure. I would trust Amazon S3/Glacier 1000 times more than I would trust a single hard drive, and Amazon Cloud by extension. I would like to see published their reliability figures and infrastructure information. I could ask an AWS contact.

Background
Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.

This cloud service is not Amazon S3 or Glacier; it appears to be some consumer-oriented-fling-your-iphones-photos up there. I'm not saying this is bad. It's just that you get what you pay for. I'm sure there are different services levels. At $12/year I don't one is going to get bullet-proof data integrity/redundancy.

chantu wrote in post #17498843
This cloud service is not Amazon S3 or Glacier; it appears to be some consumer-oriented-fling-your-iphones-photos up there. I'm not saying this is bad. It's just that you get what you pay for. I'm sure there are different services levels. At $12/year I don't one is going to get bullet-proof data integrity/redundancy.

I know it's not, but I'm wondering what you're basing your statement that doesn't have high data integrity and redundancy. Based on everything Amazon has done it will have both IMHO. They'd be mental to build a new infrastructure for this service, it will be running on AWS somehow - perhaps just as reduced redundancy storage on S3, which is still pretty darn reliable, stored (from memory) in at least two data centers.

I'm a Prime user and had already uploaded 16GB of finished images with the unlimited photo deal. When I signed up for the unlimited Cloud Storage trial, my photos were there already, so it's the same basic storage, just with more files types allowed.

In the recent past using OneDrive for Business I tried dumping few dozen GB of RAW files and it kept getting hung up around the 36GB mark when it would start throwing sync errors. So Friday I signed up with this Amazon Unlimited and attempted to upload all 750+ GB of my RAW files. It ran all weekend and by this morning it had only uploaded about 175GB. Some back-of-the-napkin calculations pointed to 13 days to upload it all. I was doing this from my office PC and thought maybe I was getting throttled there, so I killed it and started uploading folders from my storage at home (same material, different hard drive). A 20GB folder that I started around 7PM tonight is just now up to 17GB at 11PM. I only have a 5Mb/s upload pipe at home, so I wasn't expecting miracles, but I'm wondering if the bottleneck is on my end or if Amazon is getting swamped with uploads on their end. You'd think this being Amazon that they'd be pretty much immune to getting swamped, though.

TCP latency limits your upload rate. The further you are from the server the slower your upload rate - it's can be bad from New Zealand where I am. 4GB per hour is 9.5Mbps according to this converter, which is faster than your 5Mbps upload, so something isn't adding up. Could even be limited by 10Mbps ethernet in your home.

Amazon has so much bandwidth it's not funny : "A single datacenter has up to 102 Tb/sec of bandwidth allocated to come into it". More here. They can support around seven orders of magnitude more data per second than your upload, and that's just one data center.

It's probably your connection or the software

Yeah, I don't know what's in the closet. It could be something very reliable or maybe not. What gets me the cost. At $12/ year that's very appealing as a secondary storage, or a place store my iphone photos. But I know it cost lots of money to build a highly reliable, bullet-proof system -- redundant disks, backup power supplies, backup networks, even backup data centers. Maybe I'm wrong, I just can imagine Amazon would give me all this for $12/year -- too good to be true. (I'm talking here about just about the $12/year service)