Amazon Drive (discontinued) vs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

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

Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.

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

• Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
• Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
• It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
• Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.

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

• Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
• Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are

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 tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.

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

AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.

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

Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.

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

• It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
• The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
• If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.

Incentivized