[brandur]

Can anyone with direct and frequent experience with Amazon Drive comment on how well the product's been working out for them overall?

I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scales with use, but I'm about to cross the $5/month threshold.

Edit: The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync. When re-uploading a directory, it seems to be able to skip files that it knows it already has, but I'm not sure if it can delete files that have subsequently been removed locally.

[fpgaminer]

My experience is entirely based around using the service through their REST API, so probably not relevant to your case specifically, but perhaps useful for others. $60/yr for unlimited is impossible to beat for my use case (>4TB of data with potential for downloading most of that).

The REST API is dodgy at the best of times. About 1 in 4 requests fail with random errors (Internal Server Error, Timeout, TooManyRequests, Temporarily Unavailable, etc). The API has an aggressive authentication scheme that requires re-auth every 5 minutes or so. Detecting when re-auth is needed is done by waiting for an Unauthorized error on any request. At least, that's what the spec says. What actually happens is that it returns 401 sometimes, and other times it returns a generic 4xx or 5xx class error with the error's message mentioning that the auth token has expired (sometimes the error message even says 401 Unauthorized, even though the actual error code isn't 401).

Upload speed is quite bad, in part due to the constant errors requiring re-tries and backoff, but mostly because the total response round-trip time is slow. This is particularly cumbersome for many small uploads.

Recently I've been getting waves of TooManyRequests errors, where it will only return TooManyRequests for a day, or even a whole week, making the service unavailable to me (currently in contact with them to see if this can get fixed).

So in other words, I've been using the service for about 5 months and managed to upload only ~1TB of data to the drive (on a 20Mb/s up line). From what I hear the official client suffers similar issues in terms of sync-ing speed.

For $60/yr and no real alternative for me, I feel I'm getting what I pay for. I just wish the API wouldn't completely die for days on end.

[mwambua]

I've been fairly happy with it... though I'm not a heavy user. I've mostly used it to backup pictures and email.

I use rclone (http://rclone.org/) for my syncing email backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be worthwhile checking out.

Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely useful for serverside backups.

[DavideNL]

Unfortunately rclone doesn't support encryption (yet) though... so the cloud provider can see all your data - https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/219

(unless of course you manually encrypt it locally before upload)

[mwambua]

Mmm... true. Though if you're truly paranoid then you'll never really trust anyone to encrypt your data. :) I use tools like attic (https://attic-backup.org/) to create encrypted snapshots of my backups.

[DavideNL]

> The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync

note that you can use many other clients like for example "Arq Backup" or "acd_cli" ( https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli ) to transfer files to Amazon Cloud Drive.