Anyone Use Amazon Cloud Drive For Photo Backup?

PDub · 18 Nov 2015

Amazon's Prime offer of £59 ends today and i noticed that part of the deal is unlimited cloud photo backup. Unlimited RAW file backup sounds good to me for 59 quid a year on its own without all the usual Prime stuff.

Just wondered if anyone is using it and what their thoughts are on it.

Thanks.

Andy Taylor · 18 Nov 2015

We had a Prime subscription for the video downloads and free delivery. I'm using Amazon Photos as my secondary backup location for unprocessed RAW files only. I have the Amazon Drive app on my MacBook and that seems to work pretty well for uploading folders of photos.
There's a web interface too and you can view/share your uploaded photos in galleries or folders.

ianp5a · 18 Nov 2015

I have prime for TV. And I've uploaded loads of pictures but if I ever change TV provider I guess they'll dump all my pictures. And it is a pain to upload via a browser as they don't provide a client for my computer. Warning, fat cat, don't care attitude.

Spiderdudeuk · 18 Nov 2015

I use it for backing photos up that I'll use later in Facebook or Twitter posts for our football club.

Don't have prime, just use free service and it's been excellent.

admirable · 20 Nov 2015

PDub said:
Amazon's Prime offer of £59 ends today and i noticed that part of the deal is unlimited cloud photo backup. Unlimited RAW file backup sounds good to me for 59 quid a year on its own without all the usual Prime stuff.

Just wondered if anyone is using it and what their thoughts are on it.

Thanks.

Pro photographers not allowed, they send you an email giving you 24 hrs to remove all content and then they delete them

johnnypanic · 20 Nov 2015

I've uploaded over 250Gb of raw files. Handy as an emergency backup.

Have prime anyway, so just see this, as a very handy additional feature.

jwsmith · 22 Feb 2016

Resurrecting an old thread but I signed up to Prime last weekend and have been pleasantly surprised with how easy I've been able to use Amazon Cloud Drive as a secondary photo backup from my Ubuntu server that hosts my raw files, especially considering there's no native Linux client.
Using acd_cli and a cronjob it's been pretty trivial to push any new files to Amazon Cloud Drive at regular intervals. acd_cli just requires Python3 with a few Python package dependencies and so should be portable across platforms and less faff than Amazon's own clients.

ianp5a · 22 Feb 2016

Nice, for techies. But the rest of us have to upload the slow way via the browser. Come on Amazon! Tweak the Android app or something. We're paying customers.

jwsmith · 23 Feb 2016

ianp5a said:
Nice, for techies. But the rest of us have to upload the slow way via the browser. Come on Amazon! Tweak the Android app or something. We're paying customers.

You're definitely right that Amazon could do much better - they seem to have a couple of (not particularly featureful) apps and the web uploader and then have left it to 3rd parties (which often requires you to pay again!) to provide the useful features such as auto-backup and syncing. This might be OK if you're on Mac and Windows or using a QNAP or Synology NAS but otherwise it's not great.

acd_cli is great but does require being comfortable with working on the CLI and the documentation seems targeted towards more involved tasks (such as mounting the drive as local storage) whereas for my usage, once I'd gotten my head around it then it was quite simple.
Install via Pip (the Python package manager), run the 'init' steps (which sets up the auth with your Amazon account), perform an initial sync and then I run the following daily to push and changes to a 'raw' subdirectory beneath the 'Pictures' directory on Cloud Drive (since existing files are skipped automatically), "acd_cli upload /home/<user>/Pictures/raw/ /Pictures/".
I basically followed the first half of this guide but created my own Amazon security profile to setup the auth credentials rather than use the acd_cli built-in method, which was a bit fiddly due to my unfamiliarity with the Amazon Developer platform; I'm sure the acd_cli built-in method is perfectly secure but I'm generally prepared to work my way through something for a little extra security.