Today Amazon launched its cloud storage service for customers offering for free, 5GB of online, reachable from anywhere, data storage. US customers who purchase at least one digital music album from Amazon get 15GB of extra space for the first year ($20/year thereafter). Mp3 files that are purchased from Amazon can be saved to the cloud drive and they do not count against the storage limitations. This of course lends more credence to my prediction that Amazon is planning to introduce an Android powered tablet this year.
The cloud storage supports other file types as well; the default folder structure includes music, pictures, videos and documents implying that there are no real restrictions on file types. File upload size is limited to 2GB per file which is much larger than other free services such as Skydrive, but the mechanism for upload is one file at a time using a web interface. This of course is more difficult than systems like Dropbox. Other than file size, the biggest advantage I see is that access is over https, which is available everywhere unless the site its self is specifically blocked.
Amazon also offer a browser based audio player for the music you store in their cloud and the Amazon MP3 app for Android has been updated to support audio streaming of your collection as well.
Since this will be the 4th such cloud based storage solution I have, I think I utilize it a little differently. Given the generous file upload size, I think I will make a backup of the important files from my local PC, encrypt it using TrueCrypt, then move it to the cloud for safe keeping. This will not be my only backup of course, but the price is right as a secondary.
I would encourage anyone looking for additional file space to give Amazon Cloud Drive a try. I would read over the terms and conditions as well as the disclaimers; as with anything that is free, you are the only party responsible for your data.
No comments:
Post a Comment