Yes, sadly, the concept of Intellectual Property and how it is getting (mis)used by some of the big players is relatively new and, for obvious reasons, not something Bezos and his brethren want to publicize.

Apparently some years back (2008), folks who previously purchased "1984" for their Kindles discovered that Amazon had "retrieved" said copies (due to some sort of kerfuffle with the author's estate or something). Amazon reimbursed them and said they were sorry. Of course, those who purchased the hard copies of the book were not affected.

An interesting read is "The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy" by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz - where they essentially point out that the concept of "ownership" no longer means what people think. It's one thing that people believe they "bought" that copy of software for $10 or $1000 when in fact it has always been the case that the money was to purchase the right to use said software (thus the whining about Adobe's and others' subscription schemes falls on deaf ears to those who understand the realities), but when something like a book that you ostensibly "bought" is suddenly retracted because, well for whatever reason, it shakes your confidence in what it means to have "bought" that book.

The bigger lesson, particularly with the "free" services like Google, Facebook et al, is that you are not the customer...you are the product that they sell to their actual customers, who are the advertisers.

I'm not sure if you are looking for archival storage or online viewing. Certainly Amazon Prime is good if your format is supported, as is Google Photos (though will not store RAW of any type). But for archival storage, BackBlaze can not be touched. UNLIMITED storage of all your documents, music, video and images for $6/month? Just watch out for cap limits from your ISP which can have awful surcharges if you exceed the limit. For instance, Cox gives me 1 TB/month which is great but if I exceed it the surcharges are $10/100 MB above the cap.

Donald -

I’m so glad you posted this. I’ve been using their back up service as an “extreme” emergency should I lose my original, and both portable backup drives; but I am kind of worried about having to use them to restore anything. I have Amazon set to backup, not sync, because I was very worried about giving control to delete files, fearing I would not discover missing files til it was too late. Right now, Amazon shows I have over 150k photo files, while my LR catalog and Photos library combined show only about 50k. I’m sure it has something to do with both Amazon software and my manual upload process when I first started using it.

Do you feel, in your research, that Amazon’s sync features are sufficiently programmed to alleviate my fears, and do you intend to use Amazon’s sync features when you start, or will you just be doing backups?

Thanks again for posting your thoughts and research. I’ll also send in a request to Amazon to support your CR3 files (in addition to my NEF’s)...

~Chris