
Amazon Cloud Drive is currently broken garbage - DanielDent
https://github.com/DanielDent/git-annex-remote-rclone/commit/1e76436d23591560ea3fa160f9f8b284d39d2372
======
jasode
The rclone api access key was revoked.

A few months ago, I was doing extensive research on personal cloud backups
(Backblaze, Amazon Cloud Drive, etc). My requirement was to have _client-side_
encryption synced to the cloud. A modicum of googling led me to rclone. After
reading about how rclone works, I immediately made a mental comparison to
Amazon's "official" client GUI sync program and thought, _" there's no way
Amazon has blessed rclone."_ It would be very risky to invest hours into
building custom backup scripts built on top of rclone if Amazon blocks it.
Well, it turns out _that 's exactly what has happened._

~~~
DanielDent
rclone was blessed by Amazon. It was an official app developed by a developer
using their official API.

And now, without any warning, it is not. For many use cases, rclone is the
only practical way of getting data in and out of Amazon Cloud Drive.

Amazon still hasn't bothered contacting me to let me know. Despite the fact
that rclone was used with my Amazon Cloud Drive account daily.

"Oh hey FYI, we've disabled the app you use to access your data, good luck
getting your data, have a nice day" would have actually been better than they
approach they chose instead (disable my access + radio silence).

Fortunately I planned for this eventuality.

But this is yet another striking reminder of how foolish it would be to doing
anything important while depending on just one cloud company.

After the thunderstorm, when the sun shines, often the clouds are no longer
there.

------
niftich
Link as originally submitted leads to a commit message where the submitter,
maintainer of git-annex-remote-rclone, a tool which wraps the multi-provider
cloud storage client rclone [1], makes the following comment:

 _" Amazon has, without warning, revoked the API keys necessary for users to
access the data that Amazon's paying customers have entrusted with Amazon. A
data storage offering that simply stops working one day is not a data storage
offering at all."_

In effect, this is a self-submission to an opinion that leads to a dead end; I
propose a better source is this reddit thread [2] which includes a screenshot
of an email from Amazon support confirming the news.

As another poster writes, Amazon has revoked rclone's OAuth2 API key. However,
consider that rclone's default OAuth2 client id and secret are compiled into
the rclone executable, and thus effectively public; aka. anyone can extract
them and pretend to be rclone, and fool users into obtaining access and abuse
them for unrelated purposes.

A _far_ better option is for the cloud provider to let users generate their
own OAuth2 clients, such as Google does (and supposedly Microsoft, although
for me it's always errored out). Unfortunately, Amazon has a "call us" style
of Developer access, which effectively translates to no new API access being
granted to these types of users.

The speculation around the web is that Amazon also wanted to shut this down
because they offered "unlimited" storage, and people were using it to store
very large amounts of hard-to-compress, hard-to-dedup data. Breaking a popular
tool used to accomplish this (e.g. it supported on-the-fly encryption,
producing the exact style of difficult data) will cause some portion of less
profitable users to migrate elsewhere. This may or may not be true, but it's
certainly an intriguing point.

[1] [https://rclone.org/](https://rclone.org/) [2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_confirmed_rclone_is_revoked_aka_banned/)

~~~
DanielDent
My submission was unnecessarily terse. Thank you for expanding upon it.

I agree with all your points about OAuth2 clients. But I would also add:

All clients (Amazon official or not) will ultimately need to have API keys
compiled into them, and/or use a (less secure for the user) remote service to
do the OAuth flow.

And for all of these clients, it will be possible for users to obtain the keys
with some very simple reverse engineering and/or protocol analysis.

Which makes this entire thing seem like a real waste of everyone's time.
Provide an API/service available on the internet, or don't.

Trying to tell people exactly which configuration of which software they
should use to access your service is both disrespectful of your user's freedom
as well as a fool's errand.

------
slau
Better links:

[https://github.com/DanielDent/git-annex-remote-
rclone/issues...](https://github.com/DanielDent/git-annex-remote-
rclone/issues/22)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_confirmed_rclone_is_revoked_aka_banned/)

------
Jayakumark
I used them years ago as part of free trial offer but they had rate limiting
for their APIs ,it was totally unusable, to upload it would take months to
finish my NAS drive, so i stopped using them completely. its the crappiest i
have ever seen.

------
dicroce
Amazon Cloud Drive's shitty sync application still works...

------
pvg
Context-free rageclick post is pretty much always lousy, whatever the current
status of Amazon Cloud Drive.

~~~
astebbin
Here is more context, found via Google:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_confirmed_rclone_is_revoked_aka_banned/)

------
chrisblackwell
but did they read the Terms of Service...

~~~
astebbin
Where in the TOS is rclone's behavior prohibited?

EDIT: "You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of
or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or
service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to
resell any part of the Service." I imagine "your own file storage application"
is at issue here.

But if customers should only use the (reportedly awful) official app to sync
files, why offer an API at all?

[https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/post/TxRNQX3SWVLUYC/Amazo...](https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/post/TxRNQX3SWVLUYC/Amazon-
Cloud-Drive-Now-Accessible-via-REST)

