Amazon Drive will shut down at the end of the year, giving customers just a couple of months to migrate their data to alternatives.
Amazon Drive was the company’s entry in the consumer cloud storage, but the service never achieved the popularity and success of Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud and other rivals. As a result, the company says it is ending the service, effective December 31, but Amazon Photos will continue.
The company has a notice on the Amazon Drive main page:
Starting December 31, 2023, Amazon Drive will no longer be supported.
Please use Amazon Photos to access your photos and videos moving forward. DO NOT DELETE your photos and videos files from your Amazon Drive account if you would like to access them through Amazon Photos. Deleting photos and videos from Amazon Drive will result in deletion from Amazon Photos. For additional help, visit our FAQ page.
Uploads to Amazon Drive will no longer be supported after January 31, 2023. You can still upload photos and videos to Amazon Photos.
In its FAQ page, Amazon says it is “taking the opportunity to more fully focus our efforts on Amazon Photos.”
Amazon Drive and Amazon Photos are separate cloud storage services. Amazon Drive provides cloud storage for most common file types like jpeg, .pdf, .doc, and more. Amazon Photos offers editing and organizing features for photos and videos.
While Amazon Drive and Amazon Photos are separate services, they access the same photo and video files, so any photo or video uploaded on Amazon Drive is available through Amazon Photos.
Customers can access their files here: amazon.com/clouddrive.