Synology Cloud Sync Adds Amazon Cloud Drive
The latest Synology DSM update out this week adds some critical security fixes but there’s also a nice update to the Cloud Sync application.1 If you are using Amazon’s new Cloud Drive service your Synology can now automatically sync (both directions) with the service.
The Amazon Cloud Drive is free for unlimited storage of photos and videos with a Prime membership. Or, you can sync an unlimited amount of data of any kind for $60 per year. I have a few comments about the Cloud Drive option.
The web application is not that good. When you consider Amazon’s technical capabilities it feels like they really phoned this one in.
There’s no desktop application for using all of that data efficiently.2 This isn’t a Dropbox replacement for most people.
$60 is incredibly cheap for completely unlimited storage. Upload and download times are only limited by your normal ISP throttles so it’s superior to Glacier for archiving.
Once Arq supports Amazon Cloud Drive, this is going to be extremely useful and may be an excellent replacement for other backup services.
For now, this is an excellent addition for Synology owners. You get a 3 week free trial of the Amazon unlimited Cloud Drive if you’re not sure. Or just use it for photos (not RAW) and it’s included as part of your Amazon Prime subscription.3
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Amazon’s business is selling stuff. Directed marketing is part of that business. They also run the infrastructure for every startup that has back-end storage. AWS is a significant part of the world’s infrastructure and it would be a huge problem if Amazon was inappropriately using that data and also against some of their privacy rules. For now, I’m storing encrypted disk images with them and files that have no real identifiable information. Those decisions are personal and everyone is different. ↩︎