In order to shop online from Amazon, you have to have an Amazon account. We can create an Amazon account through its desktop website or through the Amazon shopping app for smartphones. As soon as you create an Amazon account, you become entitled to 5 GB free cloud storage on Amazon Drive. You can buy more space by subscribing to a paid Amazon Drive plan.
Amazon Drive is ending soon
Amazon Drive has been in operation for the last one decade but recently Amazon announced that Amazon Drive is going to be retiring after January, 2023. There are two important dates to remember in this regard:
- January 31, 2023: Amazon Drive is retiring. Users won’t be able to upload new files after this date but they can download files already on the cloud drive.
- December 31, 2023: Amazon Drive ends all operation. Users won’t be able to download any files after this.
Switch to Amazon Photos
So what should the users can do? Fortunately, Amazon has started another cloud service already called Amazon Photos. On this service, Amazon account holders can upload their pictures and videos directly from their smartphone or the desktop app. All of your photos and videos stored on Amazon Drive will automatically be available from Amazon Photos. However, if you delete any of these photos or videos from your Amazon Drive account, then they will also be deleted from the Amazon Photos.
Download non-media files from Amazon Drive
While Amazon Photos brings a relief for all Amazon Drive users, it supports only photos and videos. All the files that do not fall in the photo or video category on your Amazon Drive account will not be transferred to Amazon Photos. Those files have to be downloaded manually by the users. You can download them and store them over to some other reliable cloud storage services such as Google Drive or Apple iCloud.
You can find more information about Amazon Drive’s retirement from https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive.