If you can't upload to Amazon Photos right now, don't worry – no one can

Amazon has confirmed people are unable to upload files to its Photos storage service, and believes it will be fixed sometime today. Netizens have complained neither the apps nor the websites for Amazon Photos and its sibling Amazon Drive are functioning correctly. Judging by comments posted on DownDetector.com and emails from …

[Ken Moorhouse]

Please be assured that your content is safe and secure.

If not they will shortly be rebranding as Swanny Photos.

[Intractable Potsherd]

Problem may have started earlier.

My wife's iPhone couldn't back up to her Google Photos account since last Saturday (8th May). However, we were staying in a hotel for a few days, so there might have been a restriction on the amount or type of data being sent.

[ecofeco]

Who?

I didn't even know this existed.

And I shall now promptly still not care.

[hoola]

The Cloud

And this is what people just fail to understand. If you put stuff on storage you do not own, you may never see it again. The more layers between you and that storage the greater the risk.

I hope that for people who have reinstalled the App they can get the stuff back. Many also do not realise that what you do on the local device is reflected on the remote storage. These online tools are not backups.

I demonstrated this to my kids (17 & 19, both relatively tech aware) using SyncThing to show how these tools work in an environment where we controlled both ends. They were surprised at what happened. I know you can do stuff to mitigate some deletion events but for most people, they simply do not have the knowledge to do that, they just trust the App and the cloud it connects to, fire and forget.

[IGotOut]

Re: The Cloud

Many also do not realise that what you do on the local device is reflected on the remote storage. These online tools are not backups.

Not true. Many of the photo ones are not two way, but are back up. Apple actually recommendeds iCloud as back up storage to save space on your iDevice.

[Anonymous Coward]

This Is Why...

...I recently invested in a NAS.

I got fed up with the slow upload speeds to the cloud (not even close to what my broadband is capable of), and the slow downloads (the speed being inversely proportional to how urgently I needed the data). And that's on top of when it just doesn't work, or decides there was 'an error' when it gets 90% of the way through a major transfer. Or when my ISP is down (also with the inversely proportional thing being involved).

At least now I have my own 'cloud' I can work on things immediately, and not some time tomorrow once they finally finish downloading.