Yesterday Amazon released a desktop client for Macs and Window computers to automatically sync files between Amazon Cloud Drive and your computer. While Amazon already offers Cloud Drive to store files with it was missing that essential piece that made it easy for people to move files between their desktop/laptops and their Cloud Drive. Amazon has now become a direct competitor to Dropbox, who also uses Amazon cloud storage to provide their service.
How does Amazons new cloud sync client stack up? Well let’s take a look. Once you login to your Amazon account you can simply visit the Amazon Cloud Drive page and download the client for your computer. Downloading and installing are pretty easy. You do have to install Microsoft .NET but it will download and install it with very little problem.
It is a pretty large download compared to some of the other alternatives out there but once it is installed it is not much different that Dropbox. It creates a separate folder on your computer that you can copy/move files into and it will automatically sync those files up to your Amazon Cloud Drive. You get 5GB of space for free so you have enough free space to save some of your most important files. There is no referral plan to earn extra storage space but considering the prices for extra storage with Amazon Cloud Drive
If you compare Amazon Cloud Drive prices are certainly better than some of the competition.
| Storage Size | Amazon Cloud Drive | Dropbox | Google Drive | Box | Bitcasa |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20GB | $10.00 / year | ||||
| 50GB | $25.00 / year | $239.88 / year | |||
| 100GB | $50.00 / year | $99.00 / year | $59.88 / year | ||
| 200GB | $100.00 / year | $199.00 / year | $119.88 / year | ||
| 500GB | $250.00 / year | ||||
| 1000GB | $500.00 / year | $499.00 / year | $599.88 / year | $99.00 / year (infinite storage) |
The new desktop client allows you to sync your files to the cloud and to your other computers. What is missing is some of the integration that makes the application nice to work with. For example with Dropbox you can easily share a file from your Dropbox by right clicking on the file and copying the share link. With Amazon you can share files but you need to do it through the website.
I have only been using the client application for a few hours but overall it is a good start by Amazon and it certainly turns up the heat on the cloud storage wars that has been happening here in 2013.
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