Amazon Cloud Drive is now offering unlimited plans for photos and for everything and many people are probably taking advantage of this great offer from Amazon but there as a few issues I have already run into in my trial that I wanted to share.
First off the unlimited plans appear to be US only. I am in Canada and have an Amazon.com account and had no problem signing up for the trial. I am not sure why I had no problems but as John pointed out the new unlimited offer is US only. Amazon does actually say this in the terms of service for the new Cloud Drive in section 3.2
3.2 Usage Restrictions and Limits. The Service is offered in the United States.
Why I had no problems signing up and using it so far from Canada is still a mystery, but perhaps it is because Canada and the US are so close in many ways but I suppose my account could be deleted at some point. Time will tell.
Second, the new Cloud Drive Desktop application. The only way to describe it really, it sucks. It is not a sync application, it is merely a desktop uploader. It makes it easier to upload multiple files and folders to cloud drive. Downloading from the application merely sent me to the web portal to select the files and folders to download though my browser. This could be perhaps one of the best reasons NOT to use Amazon Cloud Drive.
Third, because the new desktop cloud drive application sucks, you might want to use the older Cloud Drive Sync application that Amazon had. Unfortunately if you are looking on the Amazon website you have probably seen the message below:
About the Cloud Drive Sync Application
The Cloud Drive Sync application lets you manage your Cloud Drive files from a folder stored locally on your PC or Mac computer.
Note: The Cloud Drive Sync application (formerly, the “Cloud Drive desktop application”) is no longer available for download. If you already have the application installed on your computer, you can continue to use it. However, if you uninstall the application, you won’t be able to reinstall it from the website.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201376690
Doing a quick Google search for “amazon cloud drive sync download” will give you a few options. Here are the two I found most helpful. This thread on Reddit that ultimately has you going to the Wayback Machine where you can try to download the desktop sync applications for Windows and Mac.
The other search result that was helpful was the one to Softonic download page of a version from 2012. Unlike the Wayback Machine link and download this one appeared to be complete not just a downloader for the complete application.
On my test machine I installed the download from Softonic and had no problems logging in with my Amazon Cloud Drive account and having it sync the files, but I did not do a great deal of testing on it. Use it at your own risk.
Fourth, mounting the Amazon Cloud Drive as a drive no longer seems possible. There are numerous guides out there talking about using Amazon Cloud Drive as a network drive, like this one from Lifehacker. All the guides that I read point to software from Gladinet. While the guides are all similar and say it is possible, Gladinet does not make it easy to download their software plus from what I can tell you need the Pro version to make it work with Cloud Drive, which is not free. In short, this looks like more of a pain in the butt to work with Gladinet software. Perhaps something like Expandrive will look at adding Cloud Drive support and make it easier to mount it as a network drive. In short, don’t bother with Gladinet.
Update: Expandrive has added Cloud Drive support that lets you use Amazon Cloud Drive.
Fifth, finally some good news. My experience of the Android app has actually been really good so far. It had no problem connecting, uploading my photos and videos to cloud drive. The not so great part is it is still just the photo app so I cannot see other file types that are uploaded to my cloud drive. Hopefully this is something that will be fixed and improved.
Sixth, the web portal is decent. This is perhaps the best part of the new cloud drive since I started the unlimited trial. The web app works well and I have not had any problems uploading, downloading and managing the files in my cloud drive using the web portal. This is great, but if this is the best thing about the new Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft will not have much to worry about until Amazon can get some decent desktop apps together.
Have you tried the new Amazon Cloud Drive Unlimited? What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
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