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Data Storage

Amazon Is Killing Off Its $12/Year Plan For Unlimited Photo Storage (petapixel.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the storage-space-nazi dept.
To many's surprise, Amazon introduced a consumer-focused storage option -- unlimited photo backup for only $12 per year. This was Amazon's attempt to lure customers away from Google, Dropbox, and iCloud. But it seems, even for Amazon, $12 per year for so much storage space is not feasible. The company has reportedly started to inform the customers that the plan is being discontinued. PetaPixel reports: Subscribers of the plan, which was launched in March 2015, are taking to the web to report receiving an email from Amazon informing them of the change. Amazon is offering customers free months of the Unlimited Storage plan, which costs $60 per year. It seems that some people are being offered a standard 3-month free trial of the service, while others are being offered a 12-month free period.
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Amazon Is Killing Off Its $12/Year Plan For Unlimited Photo Storage More

Amazon Is Killing Off Its $12/Year Plan For Unlimited Photo Storage

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  • Bait and switch? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dknj ( 441802 )

    How are we ignoring the blatent false advertising. They had to have made fiscal projections which show its a money loser over the long term. This was entirely a marketing campaign for Amazon to hook more users onto its service and they should be. I'm so mad that I want to spend my money somewhere else, but it would appear amazon has a monopoly in this online retail market.

    -dk

    • it would appear amazon has a monopoly in this online retail market.

      I am a happy Amazon customer, and I feel a lack of outrage over this photo storage change, but if you are looking for an alternative online retailer there is Jet.com [jet.com] which offers a similar range of products at comparable prices.

  • Business Model (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    1. Offer service at unfeasible but greater than zero price.
    2. Lure a lot of people to your service.
    3. Announce that you need to raise price
    4. Rely on inertia to keep a significant percentage of your customers.
    5. Profit

  • They HAD this service? (Score:3)

    by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @03:14PM (#52948951)

    First time I've heard of this. I always used the default cloud services that came w/ the phones/tablets I use - Google Drive, iCloud and OneDrive. Since I once bought Office365, I happen to have 1TB of storage on OneDrive, which I use for the bulk of those. The 5GB that seems to be the default is pretty inadequate given the number of videos people send

    • I had heard of this, but at the time, I didn't like their cloud software... I dunno, it just didn't integrate well with my phone, Linux, Windows, etc. OneDrive actually has a lot better support. There's even a little service someone wrote to have it do filesystem sync stuff on Linux. I think I only pay like $2/mo for 200gb or something like that, which is all I need at the moment... backup everything of value to OneDrive, backup everything of super importance to Spideroak, and also use Google Photos / Mu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Must be nice to have less total data than my photo collection for CY2016 alone. :-)

        • Ha, yeah. I realize my usage is not at all similar to people who take a lot of photos. I don't have tons of [high res] pictures or ripped movies or anything like that... and the movies that I have, I have the DVDs for, so I just do local backups for those.

          Most of my ... I don't recall how much, 150gb or so ... *is* photos (since we got a decent camera) and music, and it's growing, but we're not going to hit 1TB anytime soon. I have more stuff like games, the aforementioned ripped DVDs, ISOs, VMs, etc., b

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Start shooting in RAW mode. You'll hit a terabyte before you know it. Better yet, get a 5D Mark IV and use Dual-Pixel RAW so that 5% more image data can take 100% more space. I mean, you'd think they would have used sum-difference encoding, sign-magnitude encoding (with a single-bit right rotation so the sign bit is on the right), and bitwise run-length encoding (all the top-order bits first) to make that file format efficient, but instead, they encoded the sum of the two images followed by one of the t

  • Prime Sub (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Prime subscription still comes with unlimited photo storage (and 5gb other file storage). Upgrade to unlim everything is still another $60. I think they should at least discount that for customers who already spend the $100/yr for prime.

    • I was just going to post that Prime subs get unlimited photo storage at full quality. How long will that last?

      Google has unlimited photo storage but compressed to 12 mega pixels. Works well for my 12 mega pixel Nexus 6P camera. And Microsoft's One Drive gives up 1 T Bytes of storage for Office 365 subscribers and varying amounts depending on previous history of its use. IIRC, I have 40 G bytes on One Drive, others may have more or less.
  • Buy a MicroSD card.

    Let's face it, folks: 'The Cloud' was a gigantic troll from the beginning, too many of you fell for it, and too many people continue to fall for it. You want your photos and important data available to you quickly and easily, with little to no downtime, chance of being hacked, or chance of data lost forever? Get your own local storage. Unless you're storing all your digital photos as uncompressed bitmap files, you can store tens to hundreds of thousands of jpeg photos on a microSD card.

    • Or you don't subscribe to anything that fails the "too good to be true" test...

      Seriously, I use cloud storage for what I want high availability for. I pay $2/mo to google and I get 100 gigs. That's a good deal for me, and a money making (even if only barely) price for them.

      Sure I have TB of storage and such at home, but I make off-line backups and store them in a deposit box at my bank. I don't presume that TB of on-line space with good fault tolerance will be accessible to me for multiple reasons, one o

    • Works really well for devices where you have micro SD slots available.

      That's not there in any iPhone or iPad, nor is it there in some phones like Moto X that have reasonable storage. That's when the Cloud becomes important. Also, on the cloud, one can set things up to back up one's messages - something not easily doable on SD cards

      • But do you really truly need that or is there another way that doesn't involve sketchy 'services' that may or may not decide to be around later, or that is scanning what you're storing, or that might get hacked and all your data disappears? Do you have to use your phone for everything? Why not use your computer instead? MicroSD card adapters to USB are cheap and easily obtained; now is it easy enough? Or is 'convenience' so important that people are wiling to put up with these shenanigans?
        • True. I could have just plugged in my iPhone to my laptop, copied all the pictures into a removable drive of some sort - be it SD, USB or an USB hard drive. But it doesn't work w/ everything, though - I can't copy the messages, and also, I'd have to go out of my way to manually do it every time, as opposed to it being automatic every time I either shoot something or receive something.

      • Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': (Score:4, Insightful)

        by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @04:31PM (#52949519)

        That's not there in any iPhone or iPad

        So go buy a real phone, and for the price difference you can buy a lot of SD cards. Or, alternatively, you can backup that stuff to wherever you backup stuff from your regular computer (you do have backups, don't you?).

        • Only reason I have an iPhone is that I have family members who do, and who I want to FaceTime w/. Yeah, there is Google Duo NOW, but that's recent. My favorite phone, had I not needed FaceTime or Vonage, would have been the Lumia. I have a Moto X as well, and even that comes w/o the SD slot. If the Lumia had a native FaceTime like app, as well as at least ONE VOIP app like Vonage or 8x8, I'd switch to it.

    • Your plan is even more foolish, sd cards can and do fail. Your plan makes no sense.

      Plenty of cloud storage vendors have been in business and working fine for years.

      face it, the only gigantic troll here is you.

      • EVERYTHING can fail at any time for no particular reason. If your data is so valuable to you that you don't have it stored on more than one cheap, readily-available storage device, then you're the one who is foolish. I'd say you're more likely to be trolling than I ever am, seeing as how I'm promoting an inexpensive, one-time purchase, common sense approach to storing photos or other data, rather than uploading it to some server that you don't even know the physical location of, that can be hacked, that can

        • you can lose all your SD cards and photos in plenty of accidents at home. Large enterprises have redundant data centers. If you encrypt your data it doesn't matter who steals a copy of the cloud files. You spend more on SD cards than I do on "cloud storage"

  • Google photos (Score:3, Informative)

    by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @03:29PM (#52949069)
    Does it for free. Even though they recompress the pictures and downsize to 16 MP, you can't beet free.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • While removable drives - like USB and SD - would satisfy the requirement you describe, I'm not sure that the same is true about home hard drives. Sometimes, even if a computer fails, those hard drives might get screwed and the data not recoverable.

    • how often do home hard drives fail?

      They only need to fail once for something you have no copy of...

      Also I am pretty sure they fail 100% of the time your laptop is stolen and/or there's a fire in your house that melts your HD. Are you saying houses do not catch on fire? That laptops are never stolen?

      Your plan is lunacy. Backups aren't about any one unlikely thing, they are about a world of unlikely possibilities weighed against the loss of many things (even if virtual) that are literally irreplaceable.

      does t

  • What a shock (Score:5, Insightful)

    by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @03:46PM (#52949213)

    This is why SaaS should never be used for anything but the largest of systems, and only if a private datacenter is out of the question. No one else should use it for anything important. Price models, functionality, interfaces, and APIs can and will change at a moment's notice, and the EULA will back that play every time. The business model trumps user needs. While this can happen with traditional software, at least the user has final say on if, when, and where that happens because the old version doesn't stop working (or can be cracked to do so if desperate).

    • Imagine if you'd just finished up a year's worth of uploading on your DSL line, and now you have a month to find another service.

      I knew it was too good to be true (and I suspect Amazon did too...) but ordinary prosumers don't know what enterprise storage costs.

  • Between Google and Amazon, I wonder who kills more projects and what their lifespans are. I remember waiting on Amazon's credit card swiper until they had a chip version. The rates were better than square and others. Jokes on me, they killed the whole program instead of making one.

  • Cloud storage (Score:3)

    by John Allsup ( 987 ) <slashdot@chal i s q u e.net> on Friday September 23, 2016 @04:50PM (#52949633) Homepage Journal

    There is a tradeoff in cloud storage between hard drive failure and business model failure. For me, the MTBF of a cloud storage business model seems to be drastically shorter than that of my desktop hard drives.

  • I wonder if there is logic (versus error) to the two trial periods being offered: another example of dynamic pricing?

  • Prime comes with unlimited photo storage, along with a bunch of other stuff [amazon.com].

  • Offer consumers cheap photo storage at extremely low cost, find out that customers will actually take you at your word, discontinue service... Great going.

    Amazon isn't unique. I signed up for Google Fi, but was reminded how Google can cancel services I like at the drop of a hat, the latest example in that case being their abandonment of Google Wallet, and decided to pass of Fi.

  • I was on that plan and I recently received the email. Here's the exact wording:

    "Hello,

    We recently learned that you received an email incorrectly announcing your Unlimited Photos plan was being changed into an Unlimited Storage trial. We're very sorry about this. We meant to let you know that the Unlimited Photos storage plan is no longer available, but you can continue to use your plan until it ends.

    To make up for this, we are giving you 12 free months of the Unlimited Storage plan, which lets you store as

  • Disclaimer - I work for Delimiter This was meant to be announced on Monday but my colleagues have already posted it elsewhere. So enjoy: https://www.delimiter.com/objs... [delimiter.com] This is ObjSpace, its S3 compatible which is not perfectly positioned to Amazon's consumer product but with the number of tools using S3 these days for sync or serving content this may in ways be a better solution if you are looking to have choice of client and want the option to serve content directly from the object storage.

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