Why Your Photo Backup Just Got Much Cheaper

November 5, 2014

By Laura Brauer

Do you use Microsoft Office or Amazon Prime? If you answered yes to one or both of those questions, your budget for backup is about to get a lot smaller.

Over the past month, both Microsoft and Amazon have announced a generous expansion in their cloud storage offerings. For Microsoft, anyone who subscribes to the company’s Office 360 service—which, like Adobe Creative Cloud, gives you access to constantly-updated applications like Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excel—will now get unlimited storage on the company’s cloud-based One Drive service. Customers will not only be able to store JPEGs but RAW image files and video as well.

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Microsoft’s free storage will roll out in phases, with Office 360 Business subscribers getting first dibs while Home, Personal and University subscribers will need to wait until 2015±or try to jump the line here. Office 365 subscriptions start at $6.99/month.

Amazon responded by giving subscribers to its Prime service unlimited free photo storage on Amazon Drive. Like Microsoft, this also includes unlimited space for RAW image files but doesn’t support video.

Prime costs $99 a year and also offers free shipping on Amazon products plus a Netflix-style streaming video service.

The expansion into unlimited storage is another indicator that cloud storage is rapidly becoming a commodity. Services like Dropbox, which focus exclusively on storage with none of the bells and whistles, are going to have their work cut out for them.