Given that a big company like Amazon can shut down their services, it's best to use multiple cloud providers to allow for shutdowns happening without losing the backups. Handling the hardware side must be difficult, having to store essentially 16 million hard drives of content in multiple data centers and keep redundancy as well as the bandwidth for high data transfers in and out. It seems like a big money pit until you get a high volume of users and the hardware investment starts to pay off. They only made profit last year out of the past 7 years. Given the marketing effort needed while also trying to cut prices to compete, it's hard to make cloud storage profitable. They could have used this as an alternative to BackBlaze but it needs good software on the client side that integrates with the OS. I think the general public is also still not clued up about system backups. Maybe Amazon could have marketed Amazon Drive to their Prime members with a 12 month free trial and shown users how to upload a file and how to share it with family. They work like an external USB drive and files can be dropped into it and unmounted. They have lifetime payment options and end-to-end encryption features: Some alternatives to Amazon Drive that behave like a hard drive in the cloud are pCloud and IceDrive. It's probably very hard to market to this target audience effectively when so many people are familiar with DropBox and OneDrive that are often bundled with or supported by other services. I'm surprised they are dropping it given how big they are in cloud services but I could see how not many people would have found it to see the benefit of using it as an online-only drive. Amazon Drive allows just dropping files into the space without syncing.

A lot of cloud drives like OneDrive and DropBox keep files both locally and in the cloud and getting them to behave as online-only isn't all that intuitive. I found it randomly trying to find a cloud storage provider that behaved more like a cloud hard drive than a synced drive.

Review sites of cloud storage don't mention it often, if at all. I was going to say the same, I think they didn't market it very well. Honestly, I didn't even known that Amazon Drive was a thing, so maybe that was part of the problem. I think the market can only handle so many 'Drive' providers, but I am surprised that Amazon is tossing in the towel.

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