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It’s been a while since I started looking for a solution to store documents, my video library and most of all my photo archive online. Too many offers available and too little time to evaluate with attention the most convenient solution for capacity, functionality and cost. Services implying a physical copy – although non mandatory – on the local SSD did not respond, and still do not, to my needs, as my intention is to occupy several terabytes of space. I initially tried iCloud Drive by Apple on top of Dropbox, but I did not find anything sufficiently attractive, until I had to slightly reduce the space bought from Apple and so pay 0.99 dollars per month, an affordable investment aimed to do a backup of my iOS devices. On Dropbpox I limited myself in a few gigabytes, a space I use for boring professional activities like managing my finances and something like that.

Microsoft’s OneDrive is basically my professional solution, while I am not very keen on using a separated space associated to a personal account of mine because of the 1TB limit introduced after the launch, which included unlimited space, instead.

I never found the idea of a private cloud attracting because of aspects like cost, reliability and physical safety in spite of the advices and recommendations I received. The fact that most of the technology influencers I follow agree with this choice reinforced my certainty.

I trusted Amazon Drive (original name Cloud Drive) since the beginning, but then I almost abandoned the service in place of those I mentioned above. Lately – also thanks to a little spare time I had – I re-approached this matter again, reaching the same conclusion as before: Amazon Unlimited Everything – this is its new name recently introduced – is the service I need. Amazon Prime clients benefit of Unlimited Phots (which would otherwise cost $11.99 per year with an initial free trial of three months), but the version I chose ($59.99 or $5 per month) has got the advantage of saving also unlimited videos and does not have any sort of restriction (for the first time in my life I carefully browsed Amazon Drive Terms of Use and I did not find any essential limits). Apparently, this service is only offered in the USA, but it does not seem a particularly binding restriction. So I started to upload my thousands of RAW files produced along the years.

File transfer was very simple thanks to a very essential but effective client and the web interface offers a cleaner and simpler look and organisation. So now I have nothing left to do other than using a lot of band to copy all my photos and videos.