Amazon Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage, Cheap
storage market, Amazon announced on Thursday that it is now offering all consumers two plans for unlimited storage on its Amazon Cloud Drive. The new products will put pressure on existing cloud storage companies such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and the dozens of other storage competitors.
“Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up,” said Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive. “With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space -- they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music and files in one convenient place.”
While not technically the first storage service to offer "unlimited" space (Dropbox, for instance, has an "unlimited" option for business clients), Amazon does appear to be the first company to make such an offer to the public.
Store Just Photos or Everything
If you are a member of Amazon Prime or own an Amazon Fire device, then you already have access to the company's unlimited photo storage option. But now Amazon is opening up its storage services to other consumers as well.
According to the company's press release, the unlimited photo storage option will cost non-Prime members $11.99 per year. The plan also includes up to 5 GB of storage for other types of digital content: videos, documents, etc.
The "Unlimited Everything Plan" will cost $59.99 per year and does exactly what the name advertises: it allows you to "store an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies and music in Cloud Drive."
Both plans come with a three-month free trial before the annual fee kicks in.
Insatiable Need for Storage
While it is possible to quibble with whether even Amazon can store an "infinite" amount of anything, there is no question that we are creating staggering amounts of digital data and need our storage options to keep pace.
According to recent statistics, users upload 300 million photos to Facebook every day. Add in the photos posted to WhatsApp and Instagram and the daily total climbs to more than 1 billion for those three services alone.
It is difficult to know exactly how many photos are taken, but some estimate that the total is in the trillions per year.
Add in videos, documents, e-mails -- the myriad digital data we create -- and it is not surprising that we are starting to use words like "unlimited" and "infinite" to discuss our storage needs.
The availability of "unlimited" storage will raise a host of subsidiary issues that will need careful examination, ranging from privacy to data mining to corporate surveillance to criminal investigations. The Amazon announcement, for instance, does not state whether the personal data it stores will be encrypted and if so, who will have the key to the data.
In the short-term, however, Amazon's announcement offers consumers an opportunity to organize their rapidly-growing collections of digital data and perhaps cut down on the number of external drives and USB sticks kicking around their offices.