Amazon cloud drive now available in the UK

Trouble is, there's so many of these springing up now (Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Cloud Storage, Dropbox, Apple's iCloud and now Amazon Cloud Drive to name just a few), you'll soon be hard pressed to remember which cloud storage has which data.

No doubt someone will come up with some software to amalgamate them into one drive...

It all sounds too nebulous!

I have flick-r, but what are you supposed to do with the cloud, isn't it for putting your photo's on ???

You can put everything on the cloud (documents, videos, music etc.) & not just photos. It's more like an online hard drive. Upload whatever you like.

Okay thanks bb, i was thinking that it would make sense to put something like music from itunes on other peoples servers in case your hard drive failed, but then i got thinking what if the servers fail, then you've lost every thing, is this the time to think of SSD's which i presume are more reliable.

I'd never recommend putting everything on one or the other - they should complement one another. So if your local drive fails, you have a backup on the cloud drive, and if their service fails (most likely because they decommission it rather than any kind of failure, since they'll have spent quite large sums of money to protect the data), you still have all your data locally.

The main advantage of these services is, your data is protected no matter what happens to your property - your entire house can be destroyed to dust and your data is still available from any local internet cafe. On the other hand, you need to consider the privacy concerns - at the end of the day, with a cloud service, you have no idea where your data is being stored (not necessarily even which country), and this leaves it open to being stolen / hacked / appropriated by governments etc. It's probably fine, but it's worth remembering!

Thanks ph, it makes sense now.

The only way I will be able to remember is, by associating each service by its strength; documents on SkyDrive / Google cloud storage, music on iCloud etc.

I've got a Dropbox account, SkyDrive, iCloud & now Amazon. I'm yet to use any seriously. 

Also, it's important to read the fine print of each service as to the ownership of your content in the cloud. If you've agreed to the service provider being the owner of your content in the cloud, in theory you won't be able to sue the provider if your content gets destroyed / hacked into.