I love the news today of using Amazon Drive as a cloud server. But before I jump in and start paying/moving files, are there similar plans to do the same with Google Drive? I use google drive already and don’t really want to setup another cloud storage space. Any rumours?
Thanks for your interest! We’re pretty excited about Plex Cloud. Only Amazon Drive will be supported for the time being, though we will evaluate other cloud storage providers for potential future expansion. Amazon offers unlimited cloud storage for $60 a year. Amazon Prime subscribers get unlimited storage for photos and 5GB for videos, music, and other files. By comparison, Google Drive offers 15GB free and has tiered plans including 1TB for $9.99 a month and 30TB for $299.99.
You want to base a “buying” decision on rumours?!! 
But seriously: right now in the early days it is Amazon only.
Other storage providers may be “looked at” by Plex, but nothing of substance can be said whether this will lead to support for more providers or not.
Hey @OttoKerner,
It’s ok… people are (hopefully) excited about this! When Plex DVR beta first emerged for us to dogfood, first thing that ran through my head was how many can I daisy-chain together? The reality for me was that with the number of local OTA channels I get, and my selective viewing habits, 2 tuners was going to be just fine. But in the moment, it sure was fun to dream about a huge setup.
@Rayburn48: Amazon offers a free 3 month trial of Amazon Drive, so you can poke and prod (even with the Plex Cloud beta) and decide later if its the right service for you.
@kinoCharlino said:
@Rayburn48,Thanks for your interest! We’re pretty excited about Plex Cloud. Only Amazon Drive will be supported for the time being, though we will evaluate other cloud storage providers for potential future expansion. Amazon offers unlimited cloud storage for $60 a year. Amazon Prime subscribers get unlimited storage for photos and 5GB for videos, music, and other files. By comparison, Google Drive offers 15GB free and has tiered plans including 1TB for $9.99 a month and 30TB for $299.99.
With google drive for work you can get unlimited space if you got above 5 users… Atleast here in Europe 
But that does mean 6x8euro pr. month so 48 euro which is around $54. But then you got 6 accounts with unlimited space, so people could share the costs
Please support Google drive also,
Many people get unlimited google drive free with their college account, which is what I have.
The 5 user rule for google drive for work is currently not enforced, even a Google drive for work account with a single user can benefit from unlimited storage, effectively reducing the price to $10/month
Also, Google drive uses google’s edge network to deliver content so direct play should be pretty fast. Many ISP’s already have Google global caches in their network which should again increase speeds.
Also, Google does transcode uploaded videos on Google drive to various different qualities, so plex could make use of that and offer multiple versions/qualities perhaps without the need to transcode itself?
I’m assuming that Plex has figured out a way to work around the 10gb file size limit that Amazon has? Amazon’s web UI and 3rd party API implementation won’t allow files greater than 10GB to be uploaded. At least, Synology’s cloud sync implementation imposes the limit. The only way that I’ve been able to find to upload files greater than 10gb is through Amazon’s desktop application. Sadly, it crashes on me constantly so I have a whole bunch of movies I haven’t been able to back up to Amazon cloud.
For > 10 GB files you have to have native blueray resolution movies.
I don’t think many user will want to wait for that large a file to upload, and I’m not sure how well it work downloading either.
I know it wouldn’t work for me with about 10 mbps down and around 1 up. Many folks here seem to have 10 time what I do, so for them I suppose a 30 GB movie would work.
There is no 10GB limit, if you use the native Amazon client for uploading it (or other 3rd party solutions). These limits mainly apply if you use the web interface.
We are going to be exploring potential options for other cloud storage services, so thank you for the recommendation and tips on Google Drive.
Amazon’s unlimited account is the cheapest, I’ve found, by far.
Very interested but I’d love to hear from someone who’s uploaded terabytes of copyrighted data to Amazon’s cloud. Note, I didn’t say pirated data, although how Amazon is going to know if I own a particular movie is another question. 60 bucks a year to magically solve all my storage issues seems, well, too good to be true.
Well, I bit the bullet. Signed up for the 60 days of free Amazon unlimited cloud and upgraded our home Internet to unlimited ($15/month extra). Tomorrow I’ll see how fast I can upload our entire 6TB collection.
It’s not so much the Plex Cloud I’m excited about (although I am truly excited, of course) but the fact I finally found a perfect external backup for the files. It took me 3 full years to convert several hundreds of movies and more than a hundred entire TV series to Plex - and I have always been scared witless about losing my life’s work. Right now there is a single point of failure - our house. The Plex server, the backup drive and the original disks are all in the house… if anything happened there is no way I could ever do all this work again.
So even if I don’t get selected for the beta, I’m still grateful that Plex presented the solution. With Google Drive this would cost me $100/month, but Amazon is only $60/year. What a steal!
@i1u2smile said:
It’s not so much the Plex Cloud I’m excited about (although I am truly excited, of course) but the fact I finally found a perfect external backup for the files. It took me 3 full years to convert several hundreds of movies and more than a hundred entire TV series to Plex - and I have always been scared witless about losing my life’s work. Right now there is a single point of failure - our house. The Plex server, the backup drive and the original disks are all in the house… if anything happened there is no way I could ever do all this work again.
Same here, it’s nice to have a remote emergency backup.
@i1u2smile said:
With Google Drive this would cost me $100/month, but Amazon is only $60/year. What a steal!
Plex’s Cloud announcement now made me switch from Crashplan (55€/year) to Amazon (70€/year). My problem with Crashplan is their slow speeds, upload was never above 10 Mbit/s and Download never over 50 Mbit/s. That’s nearly unusable if you want to store/restore more than 10 TB.
Amazon Drive nearly maxes out my connection entirely. 25 Mbit/s Upload is maintained at all times and Download fluctuates between 300-400 Mbit/s.
I used the offline version of Crashplan for a while but I was never very happy with it - in fact it lived up to its name and crashed every single time without ever warning why, after much research I found it was a memory problem with Crashplan itself - it didn’t allocate enough memory to backup the tens of thousands of files. I never trusted them after that to be able to host my files online.
I tested Amazon today - 20GB uploaded in just a few hours. I have to wait till tomorrow to get really cracking, because that is when the unlimited data will go into effect.
@i1u2smile said:
I tested Amazon today - 20GB uploaded in just a few hours. I have to wait till tomorrow to get really cracking, because that is when the unlimited data will go into effect.
My internet provider will love me now for sure. With the speed of 270 GB/day it will take me around half a year to upload all my Plex data.
