Creative Cloud by Adobe is by far the most popular creative solution available on the market. Bringing together the likes of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more, it is used daily by millions of content creators worldwide as a subscription.
Like Microsoft Office 365, Creative Cloud is sold as a bundle with its most expensive offering giving access to more than 20 desktop and mobile apps as well as as much as 10TB of cloud storage. Yet, little do most users know that Adobe doesn’t actually have its own cloud.
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The truth behind Adobe Cloud Storage
Maintaining data centers and related infrastructure is not Adobe’s core business so it does make sense for it to partner with third parties. Which is why Adobe went with Amazon Web Services which handles Creative Cloud, both when it comes to compute (EC2) and storage (S3). For those looking to know more, Adobe has an extensive FAQ dedicated entirely to the matter (although dated from 2013) and CreativePro offers a deepdive of where all your content go when it is saved on Adobe.
Your Creative Cloud files are stored locally (on your device and storage peripherals) and on Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage. If you cancel or downgrade your paid subscription, you will still have access to the files for up to 90 days (After 90 days, you may lose access to some or all of your files). You won’t be able to upload new files unless you delete existing files until the amount of storage drops below 2GB which is what you get with a free membership.
What storage plans are available?
You can’t buy storage plans separate from the applications, as you would on other cloud storage or cloud backup solutions. At its simplest, you can get a 20GB photography plan for $9.99 per month (with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop) or Lightroom plan with 1TB for the same price. Both packages also come with Photoshop Lightroom, Spark and portfolio.
You can boost your plans to 2TB, 5TB or 10TB for as little as $9.99 per month. All the other packages (either single apps or bundles) come with at least 100GB cloud storage which should be enough for 2000 RAW DSLR images or 20,000 JPEGs.
What about the other services?
While Creative Cloud is Adobe’s most prominent line of business, it’s only part of the company’s offering. The acquisition of Marketo in September of 2018 allowed Adobe to beef up its marketing and commerce verticals. As part of its Experience cloud, it offers a number of services that run on Azure since March 2017 and signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft to make it its preferred cloud platform.
