By Omar Billawala

Amazon’s cloud product, Amazon Cloud Drive, has had little to distinguish it from the other major cloud storage companies.  This has changed!  Amazon has slashed its Cloud Drive pricing!  The former complex pricing structure has been reduced to two tiers, $12/year for unlimited photo storage and $60/year for unlimited everything storage.

Amazon Cloud Drive does not compete on features.  Files stored on Amazon’s service must be downloaded before they can be viewed.  Videos cannot be streamed.  Files cannot be simultaneously edited to facilitate collaboration among many people.  Synchronization between your home and the cloud is a manual, laborious process.

What Amazon does provide is phenomenal amounts of backup capability.  You can keep digital copies of everything you own which includes not just your photos, videos and documents, but also all music and movies (assuming you rip them), in one place, forever, and not worry about backing them up onto local hard drives or losing them.

At $5/month Amazon is making it difficult for anyone who has more than a terabyte of data to find a cheaper backup solution.  While it may not rule over all other cloud service companies, Amazon is certainly undermining their storage pricing.

To be sure, Amazon Cloud Drive does have some potential pitfalls–pricing could change in the future, and large amounts of data will take days/weeks to upload/download–but, for less than the cost of a single hard drive per year, Amazon is making a compelling case for you to move your backups to the cloud!