Amazon rolls out nifty Cloud Drive desktop apps for Windows and Mac

Amazon is making its Cloud Drive service, which is primarily for storing media and document files that live on your hard drive, easier to use.

The company announced Wednesday that it is rolling out new Amazon Cloud Drive desktop applications for both Windows and Mac. The apps function very similarly to cloud-storage service competitor Dropbox’s desktop clients. Amazon’s Cloud Drive app allows you to seamlessly drag and drop files from your computer to the cloud with little work. Files are downloaded and uploaded in the background, but can be paused and restarted again should the need arise.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, which debuted last year, provides users with 5GB of storage for free. They can purchase more space at the rate of $1 per additional GB, per year.

With the recent launch of Google’s long-hyped cloud storage service Google Drive, Amazon will need every advantage to keep current Cloud Drive users from leaving. The new desktop apps also makes the Amazon Cloud Drive experience much more fluid, but nothing new in terms of what’s available by other competing services.

The new apps are available to download today on Amazon’s website, but you’ll need to sign up for the Cloud Drive service to gain the storage functionality.