This was great – for about a year, lots of people were boasting about the many, many, many Terabytes of data they had stored on Amazon Drive. For me it was a perfect solution to my cloud backups. I subscribed to ODrive and synced all my working data to Amazon Drive.

Then one day Amazon announced that Amazon Drive for Prime customers would no longer have unlimited storage, and would no longer be free. In fact 1TB of storage would cost $99.99 per year. They had dangled a nice free juicy worm in front of me, I had bitten and now I was well and truly hooked – hook line and sinker.

What choice did I have? All my data was already stored on Amazon Drive so I swore a lot, got out my credit card and paid up.

Another year or so later (2019) it’s time to pay Amazon another 100 bucks and I notice that Amazon Drive is now called Amazon Photos, without really informing their customers Amazon have rebranded it into a photo and video storage service. Not exactly what I expected from a cloud storage solution.

As soon as I discovered Google Drive offering twice the amount of storage (2TB) for the same price I decided it was time to migrate my ODrive from Amazon Drive to Google Drive. The problem is, with almost 1TB of data in the cloud – even with reasonably fast home DSL internet bandwidth how do you move so much data around? To download it all, and then upload it all would take days – and I don’t even have enough disk space on my shiny silver macbook pro to temporarily store it all (the reason why I moved to cloud storage in the first place.)

Here is the solution – How To Migrate your Terabytes in Hours not Days

1. Spin up a bare metal Windows server
   1.  I used a Win2k16 Server on a Packet c1.small.x86c1.small.x86 with super duper gigabit bandwidth.
2. Install the AmazonPhotos app.
   1. Using the Amazon app restore your files to a local folder.
3. Login to Google and upload the restored files to Google Drive.
4. In Odrive unsync Amazon Drive synced folders and resync them to Google Drive
5. FIN.

I moved all of my data in a few hours, and it cost about $30.

Goodbye Amazon, please don’t try and trap me into a shitty service again.