Amazon is discontinuing access to their Cloud Drive API, meaning that Duplicati will not be able to read or write files from Cloud Drive after August 16th 2019.
If you are using Amazon Cloud Drive, you should start moving your files away from Cloud Drive while there are still tools that can access the files. After August 16th you will need to use the Amazon Drive tool to retrieve your files.
Duplicati itself will be updated soon to warn users that rely on Amazon Cloud Drive.
The full message from Amazon is here:
On August 16, 2019, Duplicati’s integration to the Amazon Drive API will be discontinued. Customers of Amazon storage will continue to have access to their content through our first party applications for Amazon Photos and Amazon Drive. Please make arrangements to discontinue all traffic to the Amazon API before August 16, 2019.
Indeed, affects other programs too. I’ve been felling that Amazon have been moving away from “Drive” to “Photos” for a long time. You can’t even download their Drive client for windows any more!
I did however spend only a few minutes on their live chat and got a refund for my subscription. Amazon Cloud is useless for me without the API.
I don’t use Amazon Cloud Drive, but if I did, I would be wondering how to migrate to another platform using the least amount of time, data, and effort – one that ideally just moves the cloud files as-is without re-encoding them. May I suggest sending out a how-to for that to this mailing list?
I am wondering what cloud platforms are least likely to withdraw their API support in the future. Any ideas?
The best replacement I’ve found for my just under ~1TB of data is Backblaze B2.
I’m attempting to move my old data over by downloading it using the Amazon Cloud Photos crap program to download my history to my computer and then using Cyberduck to upload it all again to B2.
The main problem I’m coming across is sometimes the upload to B2 fails and recovering / resuming from that is a total pain in the bum.
It is tempting to scrap all my history and start the backup from fresh - but sometimes I’ve had to go back in time to earlier backups… so risky choice.
Surprisingly, I cannot find a public statement from Amazon regarding this. I have heard from others that they got an identical email, so I guess that “everyone” is out.
I looked for an Amazon tool for moving from Cloud Drive to S3, but I could only find 3rd party ones (that will probably close as well). Maybe someone who uses Cloud Drive knows of an easy method?
Generally, if it is really cheap and they allow arbitrary files, I would be wary (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc). If it is the core business to store files (and you pay for it) I would consider it safe (S3, Wasabi, B2, etc).
To elaborate on the warning-signs list, ones that are too-good-to-be-true, or where they don’t really seem to want third parties using their API, e.g. they didn’t document it, but somebody reverse-engineered it anyway.
Amazon Cloud Drive API’s are still working, it’s August 19th currently. I use odrive on Linux and Windows and it’s working fine with Cloud Drive and I use Folder Sync on Android and it’s also working. So I’m not seeing any indications that the API’s for Amazon Cloud Drive have been shutdown/discontinued, is this specific to Duplicati and Amazon Cloud Drive?
Given Amazon Drive’s rocky history with third parties, I’d still suggest NOT relying on continuing Duplicati support, and if it turns out that Duplicati gets cut off and something else still works, that’ll ease migrations.
