
Amazon Drive removing unlimited storage plan - some-guy
https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16591160011
======
jasonsync
It's frustrating to watch cloud companies subsidize their storage, in order to
break into the market with a product that is too good to be true.

This strategy is the worst possible scenario for our entire industry. Users
feel slighted, and the trustworthiness of the cloud in general is gradually
eroded, as the scenario plays itself out over and over.

It feels like ransomware. Pay more or we'll delete your files.

When Dropbox for Business launched, it was $12.50 / user / month for "all the
storage you need". Just recently Dropbox announced pricing changes, which will
take effect in 2018. The new unlimited plan is $20.00 / user / month. And for
those unwilling to pay, there's now a fixed storage tier, which is slightly
cheaper than the original price, but it's capped at 1 TB.

Microsoft OneDrive included unlimited storage with any Office 365
subscription. After millions of users bought in, Microsoft dropped the maximum
storage to 1 TB. Users were then given the choice of deleting their files, or
moving elsewhere.

Mozy had an unlimited plan, and then dropped it and raised prices. SugarSync
had an unlimited plan, but eventually dropped it.

Barracuda offered virtually unlimited cloud storage with their Copy.com
service. A few years in and Barracuda shut down the entire service. Users were
given very little notice, and had to move elsewhere.

Bitcasa, one of the original "unlimited" cloud storage providers (and a
TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist) crashed and burned three years in.
Again, users were given very little notice, and there was talk of a class-
action lawsuit.

Time and time again we're seeing startups burn through their capital
subsidizing the storage as some sort of brilliant marketing plan. It's not.

Disclaimer, I work at [https://www.sync.com](https://www.sync.com)

~~~
hbosch
The trouble here is, I think, "unlimited" tends to just mean "a lot" and for
Average Joe that's fine. If you go to an all-you-can eat buffet, you will
eventually be unwelcome after you have 20 plates stacked on your table. Is
that a business problem or a customer abuse problem?

The ugly fact is the Unlimited Amazon Drive has been abused by media pirates
and data-hoarders to store up to 20TB (and sometimes more) at what any
reasonable person would say is an unreasonable cost. Not to mention, much of
this media is accessed and streamed often. Wander over to /r/PlexShares to get
an idea: imagine if someone had 20TB of 4K and BluRay movies stored on your
service @ a very generous $60/yr, streaming that data 24/7 to 10, 15, maybe 20
people via Plex (with each streamer paying the media manager $10 a month) all
over the world. While torrenting all day. Suddenly that sounds more like abuse
IMO.

Of course, I agree that you shouldn't call something "Unlimited" if it isn't.
But it's not a one-sided issue and I thought I'd bring that up. I don't
personally know anyone, in real life, who uses Amazon Drive. Most people don't
even know it exists. The only time I see it discussed, especially the
"unlimited" tier, is on /r/datahoarders and /r/seedboxes as an exploitable
deal.

As far as I can tell, Prime Photos will remain unlimited. I wonder how long
it'll be before media hoarders hide their content in Google/Prime Photos with
a convenient CLI tool?

~~~
mrighele
> The ugly fact is the Unlimited Amazon Drive has been abused by media pirates
> and data-hoarders to store up to 20TB

Somebody on reddit bragged about reaching more than 1PB [0]

> Of course, I agree that you shouldn't call something "Unlimited" if it
> isn't.

I am maybe nitpicking, but it really was unlimited. Nobody is being billed for
exceeding a given threshold or stopped from using it. The service is being
discontinued and people will not be able to renew it. They never said
"forever" :-).

It's like I got a special deal from my gym for unlimited access. If next year
they won't offer it anymore I cannot say "it was not unlimited".

> As far as I can tell, Prime Photos will remain unlimited. I wonder how long
> it'll be before media hoarders hide their content in Google/Prime Photos
> with a convenient CLI tool?

In another thread on reddit somebody was already talking about that, so I
guess it won't be long.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/)

~~~
csdreamer7
> It's like I got a special deal from my gym for unlimited access. If next
> year they won't offer it anymore I cannot say "it was not unlimited".

That is a very anti-consumer way of looking at it. Storage, especially for
businesses, is not like a gym membership. These bait and switch tactics are
harmful for the consumer as well as the industry itself.

You place a certain trust with data storage companies. Alot of media companies
can easily have 30 terabytes of data to backup or share. They kill the
unlimited plan with essentially a price hike. Now I am wondering "when is the
next price hike coming"?

Amazon has already cut their CLI interface and their web interface is
terrible. I would rather just keep it on a NAS with NextCloud.

~~~
PretzelFisch
I don't think you can call it bait and switch. That would imply that they
offered you unlimited but only gave you a limited amount. They did allow
unlimited storage, they have now decided to remove this product and offer
something else in it's place. The consumer can choose to stay or leave. It's
difficult to leave, but it's the same kind of deal when your apartment's lease
is not renewed. I can't really see this as anti-consumer

~~~
csdreamer7
I assumed bait and switch now encompassed this marketing tactic. If you know
the exact term this tactic is called please let me know.

> The consumer can choose to stay or leave. . It's difficult to leave, but
> it's the same kind of deal when your apartment's lease is not renewed. I
> can't really see this as anti-consumer

Your argument is simply: consumers deal with something like this for an
unrelated industry so it is not anti-consumer. That is not a good argument.

edit: also, renting is a very poor example. There are laws that govern how
much rent can be raised that vary based on jurisdiction. If renting wasn't
anti-consumer why would such laws exist? No such laws against gouging against
for data storage which undermines your argument.

------
klodolph
If you're cynical you'd think "of course they'd offer a free version and then
make you pay for it." But that's basically the cloud storage market in a
nutshell. All the cloud storage providers are in a race to the bottom, and
once they have your data they want to upsell you on other cloud technologies.
If you just need to store data, that's actually great news, because these
providers are working hard on the optimizations that make it possible to give
you storage as cheap as they can.

Cheap options are Glacier at $0.004/GB, Backblaze at $0.005/GB, GCS Coldline
at $0.007/GB. That's the monthly cost for bare cloud storage with no egress.
Anything cheaper than about $50/year for 1TB will fall in one of two
categories:

1\. Subsidized by the provider, but probably not for long. This has happened
so many times I can't even remember them all, Amazon is just the most recent.

2\. Strictly DIY, probably with a much higher chance of data loss than you
realize.

~~~
cm2187
If it is backup, it doesn't need to be super safe. The risk that you lose both
your primary data, (optionally your local backup) and your online backup at
the same time is pretty insignificant, given that the online backup will be
uncorrelated as in a different physical location (primary and local backup
very correlated I agree).

~~~
himlion
The problem is sometimes you only find out your backup is corrupted when you
need it.

~~~
qeternity
If you don't test your backups, then they're not backups.

~~~
jjn2009
yup, the assertion that both failing is highly unlikely is under the
assumption that you are checking the status of each copy regularly.

~~~
cm2187
In fact for any disk, it is important to have a script that reads all the data
at least every couple of months. It will force the bad sectors to be
identified or to be notified you have a bad disk before things get worse.

------
thebspatrol
Ah, the old "give them a bunch of storage and then ask for more money to keep
storing it" meme.

~~~
guiambros
Indeed.

My annual cost will jump from $60 to $180. That's too much for simple offline
backup , so it's time to start looking for options again :(

Glacier may a more affordable option, but my experience a few years ago has
been terrible.

Any suggestions? Google Drive is also pricey ($240); Crashplan is incompatible
with NAS, and tarsnap is out of question (>$6,000/year).

~~~
zeta0134
I personally run syncthing on several devices, and don't worry about the
cloud. It's self-hosted, devices replicate files between themselves, and
there's no real limit other than hard drive space. It runs on just about
anything too; several of my backup systems are Raspberry Pis.

It can be a bit weird to set up initially, and is a lot less magical in the
interest of putting you in control for privacy reasons, but the flexibility
added is pretty useful. I have a music folder that I sync to my phone without
needing to pull the rest of my backups along with it, since they wouldn't fit
anyway. Several of my larger folders aren't backed up on every single device
for similar reasons, but some of my really important smaller folders
(documents, photos, regular backups of my website's database) go on everything
just because it can.

Anyway, check it out. Highly recommended all around:
[https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

~~~
GordonS
For me, one of the main benefits of cloud-based backup is that it's off-site -
so if my house burns down, my data is still safe.

~~~
HelloNurse
You just need another house to burn down.

Don't you have friends or relatives at a reasonable distance who can set up
mutual backups on each other's home servers?

~~~
creepydata
I don't have a single friend that has a home server. Most adults don't even
own computers anymore, just phones and perhaps an iPad.

~~~
ytjohn
A good scenario is building a backup server/nas solution that you can put in a
little cubby at your friends place. There's trust involved that you're not
using their internet to hack the government, and you have to be mindful of
their bandwidth/power costs. So not a rackmount server or even a tower, but
something much smaller and very appliance looking. A nuc sitting atop a wd
passport or their "my book".

If it provides them a benefit like an in-house plex server, even better.

------
jetsnoc
Amazon recently disabled acd-cli and rclone from accessing their services "for
security reasons." I see that acd-cli is back while rclone remains effectively
banned. Acd-cli and rclone truly had poor implementations. Though, the timing
is suspicious for them not to allow rclone again if they implemented the
service securely again.

My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users and so
the low-volume users didn't outweigh or pay for the heavy users like they
originally estimated when they set the price for the service. It was good
while it lasted.

~~~
tribby
> My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users

I would further speculate that plex users were the largest single group of
offenders. seemed like a cat and mouse game for a while -- amazon started
comparing hashes of files to known bootlegs and banning accounts, so everyone
started using encfs, and later migrated to the unlimited plan from google
apps. I guess google's the only game in town, now.

~~~
derimagia
I don't think Plex ever really worked with amazon. Plex advertised it at first
but it didn't end up working out, sadly. See
[https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/amazon-isnt-playing-
nice-w...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/amazon-isnt-playing-nice-with-
plexs-new-cloud-service/)

~~~
tribby
this is incorrect, plex works fine with amazon.[1][2][more on request]

the issues being described in the link you posted may refer to early-release
bugs, users who were getting throttled or nuked due to the anti-piracy efforts
I referred to earlier, or any number of things (certain kinds of transcoding,
maybe?) -- it's a pretty vague article! but plex and amazon can definitely be
integrated.

1\. [https://amc.ovh/2015/08/13/infinite-media-
server.html](https://amc.ovh/2015/08/13/infinite-media-server.html)

2\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using_amazon_cloud_drive_and_encfs_for/)

~~~
derimagia
Those links are from a while ago. You linked to a FUSE solution, which isn't
first-class and you need a computer for it. You're right, it probably would
"work" with that, but I would say that's an outlier solution.

It doesn't work with plex's cloud feature:
[https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/](https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/) \-
they removed it from the list there. This would have gotten a lot more users

~~~
tribby
that is correct, plex cloud is not the preferred solution for data hoarders
using plex. plex cloud only supported amazon drive until jan 1st of this
year[1] and all existing accounts were grandfathered in. that was a pretty
short period of time but probably enough to create a problem. plex cloud is
beside the point, though, because it isn't what people use for this. they used
amazon cloud drive with fuse.

regarding fuse:

> you need a computer for it

well, not really, only to the extent that a VPS is a computer.

> I would say that's an outlier solution

an outlier solution for an outlier problem (can we agree to call that people
storing 100+ TB of files?). except the problem was seemingly large enough that
they had to get rid of it, so maybe it's not fair to call it an outlier. I
don't think "first class" is a concern for people with such ridiculous amounts
of data. plex cloud just makes things simpler, but running plex on a VPS takes
two commands and there are some pretty detailed guides out there for people
who don't know what ssh or digitalocean is. it's at a point now where there's
even a platform for automating this stuff, complete with fancy dashboard
etc.[2] needing to use things like fuse and encfs is hardly a barrier.

people talk about this stuff a lot more publicly than I would have thought, in
places like /r/datahoarders, /r/plex, as well as the lowendbox, quickbox, and
torrent tracker forums.

1\. [https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-
us/articles/203082447-Supporte...](https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-
us/articles/203082447-Supported-Cloud-Storage-Providers)

2\. [https://quickbox.io/](https://quickbox.io/)

~~~
derimagia
Yeah VPS ia computer, plex cloud doesn't require that. But that doesn't
matter, I think we're both correct, although I don't think as many people run
VPS's as you seem to think for this. Not saying it's not easy, it' s just not
the usual way I've seen people use plex. But it doesn't matter, really.

Thanks for the links, quickbox does look neat. I've been looking to get a
media server for my plex stuff and it seems to support a lot.

------
almostdigital
I'm a customer and they didn't even send out an email about it. And no grace
period? Effective _today_ and you'll loose your data if you don't pay up?

This should be illegal, I'm never trusting Amazon with my business again.

~~~
morganvachon
You don't lose your data, you just lose the ability to upload more. You can
still view, download, and delete your data.

 _8) What happens to my content if I choose not to renew into one of the new
storage plans?

When your paid storage subscription expires, your account will be considered
in an over-quota status if your content stored is greater than the free
storage quota on your account. If your account is in an over-quota status, you
will not be able to upload additional files, and can only view, download, and
delete content._

~~~
RKearney
And the very next paragraph

    
    
      You have a 180-day grace period
      to either delete content to
      bring your total content
      within the free quota, or to
      sign up for a paid storage plan.
      After 180 days in an over-quota
      status, content will be deleted
      (starting with the most recent
      uploads first) until your
      account is no longer over quota
    

So if you have more than 30TB stored (the new maximum), you have 189 days
after your current subscription expires to get it off before it's auto
deleted.

~~~
thieving_magpie
Out of curiosity, what would you expect them to do with your data if you don't
have a subscription? Keep it forever?

~~~
netcraft
being that you put that data there with the understanding that you could keep
it forever - yes...

~~~
thieving_magpie
You expect a company to continue to provide a service for you after you stop
paying them?

~~~
netcraft
I expect a company to abide by the terms of the deal that I entered into, not
to change the deal. Pray that they do not alter it further.

~~~
ebrenes
The deal that you entered into had a set duration, and it was only binding for
a set period of time for which you paid for. Once the money/time runs out,
you'll need to renegotiate a deal, which Amazon has done.

From amazon's release: "Current customers will keep their existing unlimited
storage plan through its expiration date."

Which means they are honoring the deal and not altering it and are abiding by
the terms agreed to.

------
rdtsc
>> Do Prime members still get unlimited photo storage? > Yes.

Heh. Anyone tried writing an encoder to make files look like photos, and
upload them to any of these "unlimited photo" services. I am sure they are
probably watching for it and will close the account.

Then what if it there is a way to gradually mix in data with actual photos, a
bit like in steganography. But more aggressive. And create what still looks
photos, just like really noisy.

~~~
lorenzhs
Dropbox did a thing a few years back where they gave you permanent additional
storage for uploading photos. A jpeg header followed by gigabytes of zeroes
supposedly worked just fine.

This is very easy to catch, though. Abusing comment fields might be more
interesting. Use a small valid image, and insert 4MB of data into a comment
field. It would be a fun project to implement this as a FUSE file system. I'm
not sure whether any of the popular formats support arbitrary-length comments,
and whether or not Amazon strips such data (it's image storage, after all, not
file storage).

~~~
iso-8859-1
Already exists, see StegFS:
[https://albinoloverats.net/projects/stegfs](https://albinoloverats.net/projects/stegfs)

~~~
lorenzhs
I wouldn't use steganography (it's not normally very space-efficient), just
dump the payload data into a PNG's comment field. You can do this with
_exiftool "-Comment<=/path/to/inputfile" dummy.png_ and re-extract it with
_exiftool -b -Comment dummy.png > recovered_file_. Of course you'd use libpng
directly in a FUSE filesystem, but this shows that it's easy enough. Use a
20kB cat picture and 2 MB payload and you achieve 99% space efficiency.

It's probably inconvenient enough for most data hoarders for Amazon not to
care. You can still switch to encoding it in the pixel values in case they do.
I'm not familiar enough with PNG to comment on the space-efficiency of that.

------
ChuckMcM
The 'Cloud storage' business model is simply a) get all your data b) make it
hard to move it elsewhere c) profit!

Operating a large storage infrastructure is not free of course so it almost
cannot be any other way unless everyone decided all at once "hey I'm going to
charge what I need to stay in business forever right from the start." Which no
one ever does because who signs up for such an expensive cloud storage plan
where there are so many cheaper ones to choose from?

I pitched a psuedo peer to peer storage plan to some investors once (feel free
to pick up the torch and keep running :-) where the company would 'sell' a NAS
box to customers that they put on their network and the Internet. 50% of the
available storage would be theirs to use, 50% would be used by people off
site. The NAS box would encrypt peer-to-peer erasure coded copies of the local
storage. If you're allocation of storage was 10TB you "got" 10TB of which the
most up to date copy was on your 'home' NAS but it kept the 'cloud view'
consistent within a few seconds if you had a decent network.

There was a variant where you took less than 50% of the storage and the
company would sell the extra to people on a subscription basis and offset the
cost of the NAS appliance you had in your house/apt whatever. The 'key value'
of the company was this virtual datacenter where all of its gear was
distributed amongst all of these individual installations. That needed some
interesting capabilities like ship on warn replacement drives to owners etc.

As the available bandwidth to individual houses increases it gets to be a
better idea.

~~~
fuzzybeard
Symform is the company that did this and I loved their model. Sadly, they went
out of business. The idea of backing up your data across 38 peers, encrypted,
instead of a central cloud storage service was enticing. Especially nice was
that you didn't need to pay because you "paid" by also donating local storage.
It's a great idea that hasn't taken off yet, not in any way comparable to
Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and others. It's frustrating because "paying"
for cloud storage by giving up unused local storage seems like a great
alternative.

------
ktta
Well, people might be interested to know that one person has managed to use
1.73 PB+ of the unlimited plan. Looks like that's the highest anyone's managed
as far as I know.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6583s2/the_pet...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6583s2/the_petabyte_porn_problem_public_webcam_social/)

Check out the first comment

------
planetjones
It's bait and switch. I know in /r/DataHoarder some people have uploaded
(allegedly) 1PB of data, which is excessive. However given the growth of 4K
video 1TB as a basis does seem low when the whole selling point of ACD was
unlimited storage.

Also very unimpressed that they banned rclone's usage of the ACD API and then
flat out refused to re-allow the app if the developer changed to not include
the secret key in the source code.

------
akeck
Unlimited is a disaster because of media horders, but 1TB is slightly too
small for me (I'm a serious photographer off hours and work from RAW files). I
would love a metered plan, a la S3 but for consumers, that comes out to about
$60/y for 2TB for moderate data transfer rates. Then, at the very least,
Amazon can do power law scaling for higher users (3TB meters out to $70/y, but
20TB with high transfer comes out to $5000+/year). Then they can slide the
metering as storage gets incrementally cheaper. In fact, I would pay
$120-$200/y for 2TB if they had a well-supported Linux client.

~~~
ValentineC
> _Unlimited is a disaster because of media horders, but 1TB is slightly too
> small for me (I 'm a serious photographer off hours and work from RAW
> files)._

Amazon Cloud Drive's (still-available) Unlimited Photos plan includes RAW
files.

~~~
akeck
Thanks for the tip!

------
dsacco
Well, I saw this coming. /r/DataHoarder is going to lose their shit today. It
had become pretty vogue to store tens or hundreds of TBs of encrypted data on
Amazon Cloud Drive. This became kind of inevitable. One person even had a
petabyte stored there:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/?st=J3OD0CTJ&sh=933c6a01)

Guess I'll be using Backblaze B2 entirely on Linux and macOS now.

------
firmgently
"we'll offer storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, up to 30
TB for an additional $59.99 per TB"..."At the end of their existing
subscription, customers with auto-renew turned on and 1TB or less of data
stored will be renewed into the 1 TB plan for $59.99 per year."

So if someone is using eg. 50GB of storage Amazon is going to sign them up for
the 1TB/$59.99 tier rather than the 100GB/$11.99 tier? Yes it can be changed,
but also inertia affects these things, many people don't check or can't be
bothered (same psychology as cashback offers). Judging from the sneaky pushy
way they try to get everyone signed up for Prime (the button to not sign up is
practically invisible compared to the 'yes' button and I know of several
people who signed up unknowingly and got charged) I wouldn't be surprised if
they are acting darkly on this.

------
Qub3d
/r/datahoarder will be devastated. Actually, they _are_ devastated [0]. Where
are they going to put all of their Linux ISOs?

In all seriousness, this move is another example of why I don't trust cloud
storage. I use cloud storage, both GDrive and OneDrive, but never for mission-
critical data, and especially never as a complete replacement for a good old
JBOD in the basement.

Building Servers doesn't have to be difficult or complex [1].

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6fydbz/looks_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6fydbz/looks_like_amazon_is_pulling_the_plug_on/)

[1]: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-
and-p...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-
maybe-just-for-fun/)

~~~
vosper
From that reddit thread there's a link to this guy [0], storing on Amazon
Drive 1 PB of what the poster referred to as webcam recordings, which I think
(from skimming the thread) is a euphemism for porn. As one commenter pointed
out "this guy upload $40,000 of hard drives".

I find myself fairly sympathetic with companies removing their unlimited
policies, when this kind of thing goes on. I doubt that in practice it will
effect more than a tiny number of people.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/)

------
Matrixik
Object Store comparison

Compare cost, durability, and region support of public cloud object stores,
e.g., Amazon S3: [http://gaul.org/object-store-
comparison/](http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/)

And source repo: [https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-
comparison](https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison)

------
msravi
Amazon has been de-emphasizing their unlimited plan since the end of April,
and the writing has literally been on the clouddrive landing page - I wrote
about it here:

[http://swirlingtea.blogspot.in/2017/05/amazon-de-
emphasizing...](http://swirlingtea.blogspot.in/2017/05/amazon-de-emphasizing-
unlimited-storage.html)

------
jerrac
I just spent the last couple months working on getting my 2-3TB of backups
uploaded to ACD. I had to spend a lot of time fighting with Comcast's slow
upload speeds and their 1TB/month data limit. ACD was awesome because I could
actually afford it. And now I probably can't.

Wouldn't making the plans in 5-10TB increments have also stopped most of the
abuse?

------
nickcw
This is probably not surprising; given the way they've been treating​ rclone
and its users it is clear that they don't like heavy users.

On the plus side (now that they are charging a sustainable amount for it)
perhaps they will reopen the developer API and I'll be able to get some new
keys for rclone...

------
AriaMinaei
I've been meaning to get my data out of ACD anyway. I only use it for average-
joe's needs, and for that, it's not up to the task.

The Prime Photos app is slow (even thumbnails load slowly). Videos take time
to buffer, even on a 400mbps connection. Navigating the library is difficult.
Uploads (photos or not) clearly take much longer than uploading to, say,
YouTube. And I've also seen that their iOS app misses uploading some files
too, saying "0 items remaining to upload" when clearly many items aren't
uploaded yet. Lost some memory-worthy videos that way. Of course, bugs can be
found in any product and that's okay. But sometimes you can tell that it's
because the product is neglected.

I'm now surveying the alternatives again. Any recommendations?

Edit: Rephrasing "product is neglected"

~~~
msh
Google photos, fast Food and free

------
hedora
This sucks. I have about 3TB in there, which is a money loser for them in
2016, and probably a money maker by 2018. That seems like a reasonable loss
leader arrangement to me.

Instead, I need to find a new offsite backup solution ASAP.

 _Every single time i have trusted a consumer cloud service I have been
burned. Grr_

~~~
cjensen
You've gotten burned by consumer cloud services, but there is an easy
solution: before using the service, ask yourself "is this business charging
enough money to run the service at a profit?"

Services like S3, Glacier, and B2 have sensible business models so you can
count on them being there tomorrow.

"Unlimited" makes no financial sense because it will be abused, and one by one
the unlimited services have ceased to exist. BackBlaze is still unlimited
because they are careful to limit the promise to drives powered up and
attached to your computer and require you to use their own client.

~~~
hedora
I did, and concluded it was sustainable for my use case. Apparently I was off
by a factor of 4. Each time a consumer cloud service has burnt me, it has been
for a different reason (security, privacy, and reliability were some other
reasons in the past)

------
andlier
I'm trying [https://www.jottacloud.com](https://www.jottacloud.com) now, they
have an unlimited plan for ~$70/year.

Funny story; They previously had a clause in the terms about restricting
storage space for users with abnormal usage patterns. A friend of mine sent a
complaint to the norwegian consumer ombudsman about this based on the fact
that if you advertise with unlimited, all users should get unlimited. Half
year later they've changed the terms to be less suggestive on possible
restrictions ([https://blog.jottacloud.com/updated-terms-
conditions-63f4ba2...](https://blog.jottacloud.com/updated-terms-
conditions-63f4ba28d4d4)).

~~~
ogrim
I think the new wording is more uncertain, since we now don't know at what
time Jottacloud will claim unlimited storage has been exceeded. They say that
"in some cases where the total storage- and network use significantly exceeds
the average use of a Jottacloud user, [we] can deem this use as excessive".

Before I had a hard limit to stay under, now I cannot know anymore. This was
the reason I stopped using Jottacloud, going all in on ACD..

------
rubenbe
I've been looking into trying Hubic [0] or OVH cloud archive [1] in
combination with duplicity [2]. They are both implemented on Openstack Swift.
But on Hubic I haven't found any data integrity guarantee.

[0] [http://hubic.com](http://hubic.com) [1] [https://www.ovh.co.uk/public-
cloud/storage/cloud-archive/](https://www.ovh.co.uk/public-
cloud/storage/cloud-archive/) [2]
[http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)

~~~
squaresmile
Hubic is quite slow at around 1-3 MB/s and that's from a server in OVH's
datacenter.

------
hendersoon
The problem is that pirates started encrypting their data, which breaks
deduplication.

Deduplication saves a TREMENDOUS amount of storage. The pirates store all the
same stuff; "scene" releases of movies and TV shows and porn ripped from web
sites. I would be very surprised if they got less than a 1000:1 duplicate
ratio on accounts with over 1TB of unencrypted data.

It's completely viable to offer truly unlimited storage for $60/year as long
as pirates don't encrypt. Once they encrypt, that business model collapses.

------
manojlds
I didn't realize that things I send to my kindle (via email) are in my Amazon
Drive. Logged in after seeing this post, and there they are.

------
Corrado
I just realized that I have an unlimited Amazon Drive subscription that I've
been paying $59.99/year for and not using. Thanks to this announcement I'm
canceling my subscription and saving $60 next year. :)

~~~
scrollaway
If you've actually never used it, you can probably ask for a refund.

------
ghshephard
I'm guessing Arq using them as a backup destination might be one of the major
motivators behind this decision. I was wondering how long it would take. About
6 months to a year longer than I predicted.

~~~
ArlenBales
Yep! I also use ACD for my Arq back ups, although I'm below 1TB.

------
chinhodado
So Amazon has followed the footstep of Microsoft. I wonder if Google will ever
do the same to Google Drive (unlimited storage for Google Apps users)

~~~
pkaye
Are you referring to G-Suite business plans which require 5 users minimum to
get unlimited storage which works out to $600/year.

~~~
johnpowell
This isn't actually enforced. I have about 3TB on there and I am a single
user.

~~~
_pmf_
> This isn't actually enforced.

Until it is. Then we have exactly the same situation.

~~~
johnpowell
With amazon doing this I am sure now all those people will be frantically
signing up for Google. I am sure it will eventually happen that Google
enforces the limit. And I would bet sooner rather then latter.

For my personal use case it isn't a huge deal since I just use it as a back-up
for work stuff, music and pictures. It is nice to know that if I am at Taco
Bell and my apartment burns down I am not totally screwed.

And even if the limit is enforced I will get my mom and my sister and my
sisters kids accounts and call it a Christmas present. They are always running
low on storage.

~~~
dawnerd
The good thing about Google is they've been fairly nice about grandfathering
people in. Since gsuite is a business product I suspect they'll be a little
more forgiving. Although it wont surprise me if they start more aggressively
hunting down people using the service for plex.

------
hysan
> Amazon is now providing options for customers to choose the storage plan
> that is right for them.

Something about that wording really irks me for some reason.

~~~
biesnecker
It's a line out of the current administration's "we're [slashing this
important program so as to benefit the few] to give people more choice over
[healthcare / education / etc]."

------
koolba
> Any customer that signs up for storage with Amazon automatically gets 5 GB
> for free, and Prime members receive free unlimited photo storage.

Do they compress your photos further or save them byte for byte? If not, you
can upload arbitrary data in many image formats. Even if they recompress them,
you could put a QR code as the image to encode the data. I bet someone is
trying this...

------
neogodless
I found it noteworthy that Amazon Drive announced their unlimited plan on the
very same day that Microsoft announced that they were discontinuing their own
on OneDrive. Now, I don't know how many people picked up their "unlimited
data" and migrated it from OneDrive to Amazon Drive during that transition,
but imagine where they stand now.

------
ojr
_“There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use it
resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as
it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and
free competition without deception or fraud.”_

-Milton Friedman, New York Times Magazine, September 1970

------
giarc
I think this is a good news bad news announcement. Sure, losing the unlimited
option isn't great, but the additional storage level is good. For light users
having a cheap 100gb option is great.

I was on the unlimited plan with about 150gb and will continue with the $60/yr
plan for the foreseeable future.

------
gumby
As long as you have another reason for subscribing to Prime, it looks like you
can still get unlimited storage. You just have to put everything into one of
the approved container formats (like JPEG).

I assume someone will implement a FUSE package to do just that.

------
smoyer
I think I'll just encrypt my backups and give them a JPEG wrapper and file
extension.

~~~
rrggrr
Genius. Have an upvote.

------
nodesocket
I just got bitten by this. Changed plan to 1TB from unlimited for the same
price. :-(

------
touchofevil
Do these companies that keep offering unlimited plans not know about
reddit.com/r/datahoarder? I feel like the users of that subreddit alone will
crush pretty much any cloud service offering unlimited storage plans.

------
ForHackernews
I hope this means they'll at least re-open the Amazon Drive API:
[https://developer.amazon.com/amazon-
drive](https://developer.amazon.com/amazon-drive)

There are no Amazon-provided Linux solutions to connect with their Drive
(except uploading through a web browser), and they are actively shutting down
third-party solutions:

[https://forum.rclone.org/t/my-response-to-amazon-banning-
rcl...](https://forum.rclone.org/t/my-response-to-amazon-banning-rclone/2696)

[https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/572](https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/572)

To any Amazon managers reading this: many of the developers who you want using
AWS also use Linux on their personal machines.

------
gigatexal
Bait and switch much?

------
LAMike
Filecoin.io might be a solution/competitor to S3

------
d2p
Prime members still get unlimited photo space. Just find a way to embed all
your files inside photo metadata? :-)

~~~
d2p
Unsurprisingly this was already mentioned a million times =D

------
gwerks
God damn it. There goes 9 months of continuous uploading for nothing.
Bastards.

------
tambourine_man
First they ban rclone, now this.

[https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1417](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/1417)

So long. I'll be looking into Google Cloud Platform with a lot more interest.
If only they had more zones.

------
greedo
They should have just shadow-throttled transfer speeds for hoarders...

------
dewiz
considering they give unlimited photo storage to Prime users, can one store
data inside these images and get unlimited storage that way?

~~~
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u
Yes, at least as of ~2 months ago[0].

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998534)

------
IBM
>Amazon will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan. Instead, we'll offer
storage plans of 100 GB for $11.99 and 1 TB for $59.99, up to 30 TB for an
additional $59.99 per TB.

What? How is Amazon less competitive on storage than iCloud when they're one
of the biggest scale players in cloud computing? They also don't have to deal
with the load of a trillion iPhone photos taken per year.

iCloud gives you 2TB for $9.99 per month. And the ironic thing is that Apple
pays to use AWS and Google Cloud.

EDIT: My mistake, the comments below are correct. Amazon's prices are yearly.

~~~
ClassyJacket
It's crazy that they didn't clarify that in the text you quoted. It's at the
beginning of the page with no context and I assumed it was monthly, too, since
every other service charges monthly.

~~~
IBM
That's certainly my defense. But those prices are definitely much more
reasonable given the scale of AWS.

------
trentmb
This is an outrage!

> 254 GB Used | Unlimited

Never mind. I've got 'til the end of March to find a 'better' provider, but
probably won't bother.

------
Dimi9909
lesson learnt, there is no free lunch. Eating free lunch means you pay back
later essentially.

------
tlightsky
Check out [http://sia.tech](http://sia.tech) this tech provide less than
$10/TB by blockchain storage hosting

