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Amazon axes its unlimited Amazon Drive storage plan, puts it on a 1TB diet

Mark Coppock
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For a while, some cloud storage services were offering unlimited storage options. This was a real boon to users, who could store their photos, videos, and important documents offline and in a relatively secure and reliable place for relatively small amounts of money.

The plans got a little too expensive for the service providers, apparently, and so they started reducing their plans to more manageable sizes. Microsoft dropped its own OneDrive unlimited plan to 1TB, and now Amazon has followed suit with its own Amazon Drive.

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Previously, Amazon Drive’s top tier offered unlimited storage for $60 a year. Now, that same price point will offer a still-solid 1TB. Amazon will also offer the ability to purchase additional storage at $60 per TB up to a total of 30TB of storage. The new limit goes into effect on Thursday but current unlimited tier customers will retain their unlimited storage through its existing expiration date.

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Going forward, Amazon Drive’s plans will start out at $12 per year for 100GB of storage with the next option being the 1TB plan. New customers who sign up for Amazon Drive will get 5GB of storage for free, and Amazon Prime customers will retain unlimited photo storage along with the 5GB of non-photo storage.

If you currently have an unlimited plan and are storing more than 1TB of data, then your service will be considered in over-quote status when your current plan expires. At that point, you will either need to purchase additional storage in sufficient terabyte increments to cover your usage, or you will no longer be able to upload new files. Your existing files will be accessible for viewing, downloading, and deleting. Notably, this will only be the case during the 180-day grace period — after that, Amazon will start deleting files beginning with the most recent uploads until you are below 1TB.

If you are an Amazon Drive customer, then you can always check your storage status at Amazon’s Manage Storage page. That is probably a good thing to do if you’re a current unlimited customer because the sooner you start planning on how to manage your terabytes of files, the better. If you’re looking for an alternative to Amazon Drive, then check out our cloud storage roundup.

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Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock
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