Amazon Drive (discontinued) vs. Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon Cloud Drive is a fantastic backup solution for storing your digital files on the web, but if you want to manage, tweak, organize or otherwise maintain those files after they have reached the cloud, the experience immediately begins to suffer. This is especially noted when major competitor products like Microsoft and Dropbox offer similar services at similar prices, but offer far better interfaces for file management.

Incentivized

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

• Amazon Drive automatically detects photos and videos in specific folders (that you choose). It will add them to Drive without any action from me.
• There is a desktop app where you can access all of your files (in addition to web-based access).

Incentivized

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• Less storage than Google Drive, Google offers 15GB of free space - vs. Amazon's 5GB.
• Also, unlike with Google Drive, you can't back up your work with Amazon Drive ( I also use Google Drive, since I have a Gmail account).
• A lot more expensive than Google Drive, which is 1.99/month...but they are more in line with Dropbox pricing.

Incentivized

• Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
• Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
• While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Incentivized

The system is very easy to use and it's use of apps for almost all devices and hardware makes it even easier to manage and store photos and documents. I highly recommend this as an easy to use solution for novices!

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

It is safe but has little added value.

Incentivized

Overall great software to use for file share, storage, and collaboration. Its security is great and the user management is spot on. The only thing that makes me dock it a point is that the device management as a subset of user management is kind of clunky. It hasn't been an issue yet, but it could compromise security in the future. Overall, would recommend

Incentivized

Amazon Drive Cloud has the advantage of being backed by one of the companies that has had the highest growth in recent years: Amazon. That gives us security and has been the main reason for us to trust this product. We believe that the security systems of this company are good enough to be quiet while our files are stored on their servers

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

• It slowed us down at first since we went from purely agile to document based then agile.
• It is easy to use so even non-developers can access code snippets which they wouldn't know how to access on github.
• It has a lot of features we don't have a use for in our business.

Incentivized

• We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
• Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
• Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Incentivized