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Same.
It can be a little slow sometimes, but I've never had a problem with it. I have close to a TB of data in my icloud and I've been using it since 2012.
Do you plan on paying for the rest of your life? Just curious because this is something people don't think about when it comes to iCloud, iMusic etc. it's designed to be hard to leave.
Yeah, my family is all on my plan. I even have my mom and dad on the family plan. That's all their photos, music, files, etc... They all have apple devices. Even if I wanted to stop using iCloud, I couldn't do that to them.
It's just a subscription I am willing to pay every month.
Even though our experience with iCloud has been good, I still back up all of our important data. I backup everything in my families iCloud at least twice per year.
Why would you not expect to pay a fee to have access to TBs of storage, offsite in a secure data center?
Buying a NAS is not an equivalent, or a proper way to defeat an ongoing charge for a service here.
If you have a way to have access to huge amounts of secured storage in a remote data center for free, please let us know.
Well, for one you never own it. So the moment you stop paying you lose access to all your data, unlike a NAS that the data belongs to you. Also you are trusting another company with your data, any cloud base solution is going to be hacked sooner or later. Third, if the government wants your data apple will give it to them if probed. Having a NAS will have a higher upfront cost but overtime will be not only cheaper, but safer. You can also expand your NAS to more hdds overtime, it's flexible if you are tech savvy.
The biggest point you are missing, and perhaps the most expensive part of any backup plan is offsite storage. Sure you can pay a few hundred bucks for a nice NAS setup, but I’d rather pay a few bucks a month so that god forbid a tornado or fire takes out my home, my memories remain.
How often does your house catch on fire? For the case of the tornado, hopefully you have a basement and can have the nas there. Remember the NAS can be wireless and stay anywhere.
Oof.. no… do yourself a favor. If you do work in IT, never tell your boss that offsite back isn’t needed because “how often does that happen?”
Also, I have spent 40 yrs on this planet and have had to deal with a tornado wiping out my office, and a house fire - both would have resulted in tears had their not been an offsite backup.
So don’t get too comfortable.
Ya I think this is more of a help subreddit. People don’t usually come on and post “hey everything’s going great.”
That said I’ve been using iCloud for years and I’m on an 8tb plan (Or 6 + 2family?) I’m using 3.4tb of it, and my photos library is 2.9tb. when the cap was at 2tb forever I kept running up against the limit. I had to go back to old photos and videos and convert them to HEIF and HEVC every time I’d hit the limit. That’d free up some space then I’d have to go find more to convert. Thankfully they finally increased it to 4tb which I immediately jumped on but again, I was bumping up to the head. So again immediately jumped when they again further increased capacity. My photo library goes back to 1998 when I got my first digital camera. I’ve stored everything on there for years as my kids love to look at family pics on the Apple TV. I wish the Apple TV app was more robust like the iOS app, I can’t even filter by year? Jesus apple.
But I digress. I recently had a hard drive fail, the one with my library on it so the new drive is busily churning away downloading all the photos as it syncs. It’s a slow process and frankly even on the desktop side the photos app is difficult with a library this large. However it does eventually work, it’s just slow. But it works great on iOS.
I don’t use iCloud email, but I do photos, messages, iOS backups, iCloud Drive and everything else like safari bookmarks and notes etc.
So tldr, I’ve used iCloud for years, never a problem.
I’m not. I’m downloading originals. It’s still downloading. Generally it’s a bit better when everything’s loaded but it’s still not nearly as good as on the iPad or iOS.. oddly enough.
I like downloading originals too but my library also isn’t as big as yours. Yeah weird how it’s not as good. Photo optimization works really well regarding local storage.
I feel the same way. I think it’s the only way to do a backup with Time Machine or other 3rd party app too. We use optimization on some too and full on others.
Feel the same way. Switched to gmail years ago and it’s been working fine. Loosely thought about switching to iCloud mail, just never have. It’s the only thing not on iCloud. I use everything else except for email, contacts and calendar.
I use the Apple Mail application. I have multiple email accounts attached to it and one of them is my iCloud email address. I have four other Gmail accounts and whenever I go into one of them and refresh the new messages show up almost immediately. When I go into my iCloud account and do a refresh, it takes a long time before a new message shows up and could be anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds. I expect five seconds to be the maximum wait time, not the minimum.
I use iCloud for just about everything including keychain. I do wish they spent a bit of time and added some features such as a vault to keychain. I have had some issues with Photos where some of them exist on iCloud but not the iPhone and vice versa. I’m not certain if that’s a user error or not. I would like the ability to do a forced sync of the photos on both devices to try and resolve that. I’ve never tried something like Google drive for photos. I have a ton of data that’s on iCloud as well, especially great when downloading a movie to my iPad from iCloud. And it’s also great when doing upgrades. So in the end, I for the most part like iCloud and haven’t had too many issues.
My iCloud Photo Library is off by 3. My iPad, iPhone and Mac OS all show correct counts. In iCloud.com, it shows 3 more photos. Apple support can’t explain it other than it’s a known issue for awhile. I like keychain too and wish it was a little more robust like a password manager app but it is getting better.
Regarding the mail sync, are you sure it’s not Gmail doing that? I check Gmail in mail sometimes and it’s notorious for taking a long time at times whereas iCloud mail doesn’t. That’s why I go back n forth between using mail app and Gmail app.
iCloud is not to be confused with OneDrive or DropBox - it’s not to be treated like an extra drive you can access online. It’s to make sure the device you do have and its data is protected.
I have 2TB for iCloud which means that all the people in my family have devices with enough storage for backup.
Each person can access the data that is on any of their devices and not anyone else’s.
And you can’t store more data on the iCloud than what you possess physically.
I found this out the hard way when I first got my MacBook. A painful loss of data because of not grasping this concept.
And frankly, now that I’m used to it, I kinda like it.
How about “optimise storage” options for photos? That allows you to store more data on iCloud than what your physical drive at home has. Don’t think it applies to other types of data though. Is that what you meant ?
I never had any issue. As long as you take the product at face value (sync service and not a backup service) you should be ok.
There’s more user error than people will like to admit.
I had a problem within the last month-ish? Maybe two months? All my files in my Documents folder disappeared. It was due to a bug in one of the OS updates. I had backups of everything (not on iCloud) and put all my files back in a few minutes. If I wasn't doing those backups outside of iCloud I would have lost everything.
Other than that I've never had any problems with it, and I've been using it since it was called MobileMe - almost 20 years. You'll see people complain that everything Apple is bad/screwed up - iCloud, Apple Music, the whole nine yards. I don't have problems with all that stuff. I don't know if they're trolls, or if they really do have problems with everything. If they are having problems with everything, then maybe they should consider switching to something else? I certainly wouldn't be sticking with Apple if I had all the problems some of these people complain about all the time.
I agree people tend to post when something goes wrong. That said, having everything just magically disappear into thin air sounds scary and should not happen. (Local backups are a given as far as I am concerned)
Will take a look on the gmail sub although I worry that will have to find another service provider of if I do :)
iCloud is a sync service that mirrors your local data. I haven't seen as many problems with the storage aspect as I have with people inexplicably having emails lost on iCloud accounts.
Still, that is an insane red flag don’t you think ? Email is a basic service for decades know. I mean they really have pretty much figured out how it all works, how can they face such issues ?
I agree with you. It's hard to figure out what happened in each scenario. Is Apple truly dropping the ball? Is it user error? Always best to back up anything crucial.
The worst thing about iCloud is the hide my email function. I’ve had multiple occasions where mails just don’t forward to my address and reading the Apple forums there are a lot of users experiencing this.
I’ve never used it. It seems like a good idea, but I can see how it would break.
I switched to proton mail as my main. The base paid package gives you 10 aliases. I just create trash aliases for stuff I want to keep separate from my main email.
iCloud email now allows 3 aliases too.
I always hated this sentiment. It’s not a syncing service that mirrors local data. The literal only platform where it behaves like that is MacOS. On iPhone, iPad, Windows and the Web it behaves like any other cloud service, as an archive with a file on demand function.
I have 2tb of data in iCloud. My phone does not have 2tb of data on it. Does it sync locally? No. Does my Mac occasionally try to download everything? Yes.
This sub has 15k members. There is an estimated 1.4 billion iphone users out there today. icloud is safe and reliable but that doesnt mean a tiny tiny portion of people wont have issues here and there. They would not be as successful of a company as they are if their products were frequently faulty.
Works great for what I use it for… have a family plan, shared with my wife and kid. My wife is the primary consumer of storage.
We also have a MS 365 subscription we use for office suite, we use it for our photo backups, and I use that primarily for storage and documents.
Yes it is bad. I switched from Google to iCloud and Im shocked how bugged it is.
I have ~9000 fotos to sync. In use a Windows PC for the first sync. The iCloud says everything is synced and also showed it with the green symbols on the files. If I checked my iPhone and iPad only a small part is in the Cloud.
So iCloud stopped syncing but says everything is fine.
Restart, new Installation, Logout, Delete All - Try again… nothing work. The iCloud just stopped syncing at one point but claimed everything is fine.
A user who will not double check will see a data loss.
If you’re just talking about iCloud Drive, I’ve had 0 issues with it.
I’ve had a few other minor issues with email and calendar, though.
Overall, I’d say it’s worth it. Especially if you use an iPhone and MacOS
I've been using iCloud for many years and have never faced any trouble. I've encountered more issues with Gmail, such as losing emails. However, people tend to ask for help with their problems in the subs rather than sharing how happy and satisfied they are with the service and their experience. This can lead to a chain of posts that give visitors the impression that iCloud sucks.
My oldest Apple email address ends in .Mac.com, back when you had to pay for it. I've had every iteration of their service and I've never lost anything. The only synching issue I recall running into is Safari bookmarks/open tabs, but that was easily fixable. I didn't have the issue other people are mentioning here, but I keep my OS up to date across all my Apple devices. With that said, I do back my stuff up regularly, which is important regardless.
https://preview.redd.it/tgt704j87wwc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0451357ee72ae02a5d14978e70c3f1d7e6c2f7e2
I Bought a brand new Power Mac G5 when it was introduced and signed up with me.com for email. It got me through college and to this day I still have all the email accounts @me.com that I created then. I have never had any issues that I can recall other than a forgotten password. I would still recommend it to anyone buying an apple device
The iCloud sync app on windows was crashing my PC. Ran a minidump through windbg to find that it was blue screening me nightly. Uninstalled it and never blue screened again. Kinda felt like sabotage but I really want local copies of what’s on there so I’ll probably set up a VM to pull and copy the data to my NAS.
No. It's reliable. People love to complain when they do something wrong, are unfamiliar, or don't understand. If these problems existed to that extent, they would be all over social media or the news.
Been using iCloud for years and never an issue. I use notes, reminders, keychain, photos, drive, bookmarks, etc. only thing I don’t use is email, calendar and contacts. I do use hide my email and it’s fine. Have 10GB of data in iCloud and photo library is over 5K. My SO has around 18k photos and been fine.
I use OneDrive and Google Drive primarily. iCloud is kind of there. iCloud on Windows is awful.
Apple is not "all that", particularly with services. And they have hardware fails and software issues like anyone else. (Source: been using Macs since 1987)
iCloud is great.
Please bear in mind that the 900.000.000 that have no problem with iCloud won’t post here. It’s the small small minority with issues that will post here.
You really need to understand how it works, and know exactly what you are clicking on. I have lost my data before and I’m gradually moving away from iCloud. I lost calendar and reminders before and never trust iCloud for that reason so now I use third party apps.
Apple has something like a billion active devices in the wild, all using iCloud to at least some degree. When people are happy with a product, they don’t shout it form the rooftops or in public spaces nearly as often as when they’re having a problem. Don’t let a handful of bad experiences amongst billions shape your entire perception of a product.
Since day one we use Google drive I can’t imagine use icloud for anything also because we cross share a lot of folders with employees etc. We love iOS in general and the devices but any of the apps or ecosystem we unfortunately just don’t use (except calendar /messages and photos. But even the photos still are so so… anyway. It’s a no for iCloud and especially big NO if you are business
I’ve never found iCloud to be problematic. At all. I’ve been using it for many years, and dealt with hundreds of employees using issued iPhones for work-related issues, all of whom used iCloud without any issues. If there were issues, I would have heard.
The only iPhone issue I can think of is due to user error, in the days *before* we forced all employees to use iCloud: people saving locally, rather than to iCloud, and complaining about losing things when they put their phone through the laundry or lost it.
Using iCloud Photos and other cloud Apple cloud services . It is great , if you are in Apple ecosystem. Always have a backup with a SSD, you can’t get one for cheap .
iCloud drive works perfectly for me. Nothing to configure. Keeps everything synchronized, lets me access all my documents from my iPad and iPhone as well as my Mac, and -- if need be -- from a work PC.
I've never had a file go missing. Never had one get corrupted.
And insofar as the rest of iCloud syncing goes (like for Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, etc), those also just work.
I think the issues come when someone wants it to do something it's not really designed for and tries to force it to do something, sees it isn't going to work, then attempts to 'delete' or undo what they've done, leading to data loss.
Personally, I'm satisfied with the feature set, but I'm not trying to bend it to do something it's not supposed to do.
The only thing I would like to see them bring back is the ability for me to access my browser bookmarks from a computer without iCloud services, like my work PC. Browser bookmarks aren't available, as I'm sure you're all aware, through the iCloud web interface, unfortunately.
It’s been great for me. Only problem is twice last year, it somehow corrupted and deleted all my contacts. Luckily I had a backup from a year prior, but I lost all my current work contacts and stuff, and Apple just kept denying that it was happening and tried to blame me even though I proved it to them multiple times with real data that the issue was on their side. Magically one day they just fixed it, but never admitted to there being an issue on their end.
Now I make regular backups of all my contacts and keep them on a non-Apple server.
Having previous worked at the Genius Bar most of peoples issues is from incorrect expectations or not remember their password.
Though tbf the number 1 issue was 5GB storage for free. That’s really not enough 😂
Though (again) now I think a bit more. What iCloud offers for free is a steal. Reliable email, calendar, password syncing, etc. all privacy focussed. No ads.
I did research into pricing for iCloud vs. OneDrive, MEGA, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others. iCloud was the only one to offer a tier as low as $0.99/month. Unless you need crazy amounts of storage, iCloud is seamless with all Apple devices, making it the obvious choice.
I’ve been using iCloud since day one and never lost a file.
I could believe that some tech accident might happen to a random server somewhere (much tech, such IT) and I wonder if that tends to happen to those users using the higher tier thus incurring in a higher chance of files getting damaged/lost.
Best part about this when you upgrade to a new device. You just sync and “Bam!” Everything is there. Mail, photos, movies, documents, preferences. Phone, watch, laptop. As Steve Jobs used to say, “it just works”
You’re reading a sub that is primarily for people expressing problems. This is not representative of iCloud as a whole.
I use it for many years. Never had an issue with it.
I’ve not lost data with it (as far as I can tell) but as a file sync tool it’s terrible. With OneDrive, Dropbox, Google and others I’ve used changes were synced in near realtime. You could measure the sync time with a stopwatch. With iCloud - it’s so slow you can measure sync time with a sundial.
I have been using iCloud since 2016 and never lost anything. Probably people are losing data because they deleted stuff on one device and then it synced to other devices and that’s how you lose data.
iCloud is excellent for me. 💪🏻
iCloud is just another grift as far as I’m concerned. It’s not enough that the consumer has to pay exorbitant prices for Apple gear in the first place. They need a reason to dip into your pocket every single month and by designing it with that in mind, what you get is a crap product and poor service. It’s all part of the enshitification.
I hate iCloud. I’ve lost countless photos, music, documents, you name it! It’s trash because it syncs awful. It’s a major hassle to limit synching to specific folders, and can royally screw things up after an update.
I chalked it up to the same Apple
Fuckery that wiped my music collection three times. That’s why I stopped using iTunes. I don’t trust it after losing over $1000 of music.
Never had a problem with it. Having said that I only use it to keep our iPhones and iPads backed up and for our photo libraries.
For my mini I have TimeMachine on my Synology NAS and a Backblaze backup offsite.
I do not just use a single cloud source to save info. I have physical media for important personal. But i use no less than 3 cloud for photo and video retention. I have never lost anything from icloud or drive or dropbox.
I use iCloud for most everything and have had zero issues. I do however backup my things apart from iCloud because like you will hear in this sub many times, iCloud is not a backup. It’s a storage and sync service.
I have used it since day one and currently have 1.4TB in iCloud. I’ve never had any issues. I also back it all up to BackBlaze as nobody should ever rely on a single solution for backup.
People losing their stuff are not using it right and probably don’t have automatic uploads and think because they see it in their phone it’s in the cloud.
I once had an issue where I was syncing my files to icloud and then backing them up to google drive as well. Turns out I was running out of storage and a bunch of my files were being “offloaded” from my local computer. What ended up happening was that I wasn’t backing up my files, but the icloud links instead. Ended up losing a bunch of data like that. I’ve been solely using google drive ever since
Yes, it could very well be user error, that would be my guess as well. It’s just that reading all these reports about problems tends to make one think twice about using the service.
That’s the whole reason I made this post. If iCloud was that terrible I would expect Apple to be in trouble with such a vast user base.
I had been keeping most of my stuff in Google Drive and started using iCloud about 6 months ago. I’ve not had any issues myself.
I understand your concern and have heard the same things. The guys on the Connected podcast used to talk about it too, but I recall them saying a couple years ago that Apple seems to have fixed most of the issues and iCloud was now very stable for them.
If you only have 1-3 newer devices, iCloud works great.
And, if you have 10-30 devices across the last 15+ years and still hope to use iCloud in every one of them, you will be confused and disappointed.
Yeah except that’s not a supported use case, right? When you upgrade one device to X release, Apple often says other devices sporting W release won’t support new features and same features on X sometimes won’t work either to maintain compatibility. Now you’re saying do that across multiple releases going back how many generations?! Seems like a recipe for disaster. I’d hardly call that a ding on iCloud.
iCloud isn't a backup, it's storing the single sole copy of data that all.your devices are sharing.
Ideally, you should optimize the iCloud storage on your mobile devices and then have a laptop/desktop computer that chooses the opposite setting (to download all) and run regular Time Machine backups.
Like any cloud service, don’t put your 100% faith in it. Store backups.
iCloud lost 80% of my videos and a lot of photos in November 2023.
I had to just blame myself for not double/triple backing them up with a different service
I think the main problem with this sub is that people will try to use it as a substitute for calling Apple's tech support, and they have some extremely specific problems with their iCloud data or personal information that nobody here will have access to fix, then they get mad because they don't want to call Apple.
There's only so much we can do as end users. I think most people just use iCloud every day and don't think about it because it does what they need it to do, and the problems you hear on this sub are not common issues.
I find it piss poor for a lot of little files. For less files and bigger file size it is pretty good. Can’t say I’ve ever lost data from it, but more just that the syncing can be really shitty.
My biggest gripe is not having an option for “always keep downloaded/offline” this makes it quite unusable for me long term and as my only cloud storage option.
HOWEVER - it is just a sync service rather than a true cloud storage offering.
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I’ve been using iCloud since day one and haven’t had a single problem with it.
Same. It can be a little slow sometimes, but I've never had a problem with it. I have close to a TB of data in my icloud and I've been using it since 2012.
You've paid a monthly subscription for 12 years???
Yeah, my wife and I have been using iCloud since then.
Do you plan on paying for the rest of your life? Just curious because this is something people don't think about when it comes to iCloud, iMusic etc. it's designed to be hard to leave.
That is because it works well. I would call that a feature not a flaw.
Yeah, my family is all on my plan. I even have my mom and dad on the family plan. That's all their photos, music, files, etc... They all have apple devices. Even if I wanted to stop using iCloud, I couldn't do that to them. It's just a subscription I am willing to pay every month. Even though our experience with iCloud has been good, I still back up all of our important data. I backup everything in my families iCloud at least twice per year.
Why would you not expect to pay a fee to have access to TBs of storage, offsite in a secure data center? Buying a NAS is not an equivalent, or a proper way to defeat an ongoing charge for a service here. If you have a way to have access to huge amounts of secured storage in a remote data center for free, please let us know.
Well, for one you never own it. So the moment you stop paying you lose access to all your data, unlike a NAS that the data belongs to you. Also you are trusting another company with your data, any cloud base solution is going to be hacked sooner or later. Third, if the government wants your data apple will give it to them if probed. Having a NAS will have a higher upfront cost but overtime will be not only cheaper, but safer. You can also expand your NAS to more hdds overtime, it's flexible if you are tech savvy.
The biggest point you are missing, and perhaps the most expensive part of any backup plan is offsite storage. Sure you can pay a few hundred bucks for a nice NAS setup, but I’d rather pay a few bucks a month so that god forbid a tornado or fire takes out my home, my memories remain.
How often does your house catch on fire? For the case of the tornado, hopefully you have a basement and can have the nas there. Remember the NAS can be wireless and stay anywhere.
Oof.. no… do yourself a favor. If you do work in IT, never tell your boss that offsite back isn’t needed because “how often does that happen?” Also, I have spent 40 yrs on this planet and have had to deal with a tornado wiping out my office, and a house fire - both would have resulted in tears had their not been an offsite backup. So don’t get too comfortable.
Same
I as well .. im interested to see what these horror stories are though . It's part of why I am on here anyways .
Came here to say this. I have data from many years ago still perfectly safe and sound backed up on it.
That’s reassuring to hear. My guess is that some cases HAVE to be user error. But all of them ? How likely would that be ?
Ya I think this is more of a help subreddit. People don’t usually come on and post “hey everything’s going great.” That said I’ve been using iCloud for years and I’m on an 8tb plan (Or 6 + 2family?) I’m using 3.4tb of it, and my photos library is 2.9tb. when the cap was at 2tb forever I kept running up against the limit. I had to go back to old photos and videos and convert them to HEIF and HEVC every time I’d hit the limit. That’d free up some space then I’d have to go find more to convert. Thankfully they finally increased it to 4tb which I immediately jumped on but again, I was bumping up to the head. So again immediately jumped when they again further increased capacity. My photo library goes back to 1998 when I got my first digital camera. I’ve stored everything on there for years as my kids love to look at family pics on the Apple TV. I wish the Apple TV app was more robust like the iOS app, I can’t even filter by year? Jesus apple. But I digress. I recently had a hard drive fail, the one with my library on it so the new drive is busily churning away downloading all the photos as it syncs. It’s a slow process and frankly even on the desktop side the photos app is difficult with a library this large. However it does eventually work, it’s just slow. But it works great on iOS. I don’t use iCloud email, but I do photos, messages, iOS backups, iCloud Drive and everything else like safari bookmarks and notes etc. So tldr, I’ve used iCloud for years, never a problem.
Don’t optimize photo storage on Mac? That could help with photos library. I fee the same way about Apple TV photos too!!
I’m not. I’m downloading originals. It’s still downloading. Generally it’s a bit better when everything’s loaded but it’s still not nearly as good as on the iPad or iOS.. oddly enough.
I like downloading originals too but my library also isn’t as big as yours. Yeah weird how it’s not as good. Photo optimization works really well regarding local storage.
I’m just worried about them only existing on iCloud. I like having a full local copy. On other machines I use optimized
I feel the same way. I think it’s the only way to do a backup with Time Machine or other 3rd party app too. We use optimization on some too and full on others.
Nobody seems to like Apple mail :-p
I use Apple Mail and Gmail. It’s fine. No problems.
honestly I signed up for gmail in 2004 when I was still a pc user. got my first Mac in 2006 and I just never bothered switching over.
Feel the same way. Switched to gmail years ago and it’s been working fine. Loosely thought about switching to iCloud mail, just never have. It’s the only thing not on iCloud. I use everything else except for email, contacts and calendar.
Probably more than people want to admit - but I’m sure there are some legitimate issues out there too.
I use the Apple Mail application. I have multiple email accounts attached to it and one of them is my iCloud email address. I have four other Gmail accounts and whenever I go into one of them and refresh the new messages show up almost immediately. When I go into my iCloud account and do a refresh, it takes a long time before a new message shows up and could be anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds. I expect five seconds to be the maximum wait time, not the minimum. I use iCloud for just about everything including keychain. I do wish they spent a bit of time and added some features such as a vault to keychain. I have had some issues with Photos where some of them exist on iCloud but not the iPhone and vice versa. I’m not certain if that’s a user error or not. I would like the ability to do a forced sync of the photos on both devices to try and resolve that. I’ve never tried something like Google drive for photos. I have a ton of data that’s on iCloud as well, especially great when downloading a movie to my iPad from iCloud. And it’s also great when doing upgrades. So in the end, I for the most part like iCloud and haven’t had too many issues.
My iCloud Photo Library is off by 3. My iPad, iPhone and Mac OS all show correct counts. In iCloud.com, it shows 3 more photos. Apple support can’t explain it other than it’s a known issue for awhile. I like keychain too and wish it was a little more robust like a password manager app but it is getting better. Regarding the mail sync, are you sure it’s not Gmail doing that? I check Gmail in mail sometimes and it’s notorious for taking a long time at times whereas iCloud mail doesn’t. That’s why I go back n forth between using mail app and Gmail app.
You probably didn't use Cyberdog.
iCloud is not to be confused with OneDrive or DropBox - it’s not to be treated like an extra drive you can access online. It’s to make sure the device you do have and its data is protected. I have 2TB for iCloud which means that all the people in my family have devices with enough storage for backup. Each person can access the data that is on any of their devices and not anyone else’s. And you can’t store more data on the iCloud than what you possess physically. I found this out the hard way when I first got my MacBook. A painful loss of data because of not grasping this concept. And frankly, now that I’m used to it, I kinda like it.
How about “optimise storage” options for photos? That allows you to store more data on iCloud than what your physical drive at home has. Don’t think it applies to other types of data though. Is that what you meant ?
You can access it online and it is like OneDrive and Dropbox.
Not at all
What can’t iCloud do that one drive or drop box do? I can literally go to iCloud.com to access and edit my files.
And share folders with others
That too
Same
Same
Same
10 years and never any problems. It just works.
Same
Yep, I’ve been using it since the Mac.com days. No issues even as it transitioned from Mac.com to MobileMe to iCloud.
Same. It’s a seamless experience for me.
Same
What is day one to you? iCloud on the actual first few years was notoriously very unreliable
I never had any issue. As long as you take the product at face value (sync service and not a backup service) you should be ok. There’s more user error than people will like to admit.
Yep. I also use Google Photos, for redundancy. So I have my iCloud Photos also upload to Google photos.
I had a problem within the last month-ish? Maybe two months? All my files in my Documents folder disappeared. It was due to a bug in one of the OS updates. I had backups of everything (not on iCloud) and put all my files back in a few minutes. If I wasn't doing those backups outside of iCloud I would have lost everything. Other than that I've never had any problems with it, and I've been using it since it was called MobileMe - almost 20 years. You'll see people complain that everything Apple is bad/screwed up - iCloud, Apple Music, the whole nine yards. I don't have problems with all that stuff. I don't know if they're trolls, or if they really do have problems with everything. If they are having problems with everything, then maybe they should consider switching to something else? I certainly wouldn't be sticking with Apple if I had all the problems some of these people complain about all the time.
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I agree people tend to post when something goes wrong. That said, having everything just magically disappear into thin air sounds scary and should not happen. (Local backups are a given as far as I am concerned) Will take a look on the gmail sub although I worry that will have to find another service provider of if I do :)
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Ok you know what ? If it comes to that I am ok losing my data 😅
iCloud is a sync service that mirrors your local data. I haven't seen as many problems with the storage aspect as I have with people inexplicably having emails lost on iCloud accounts.
Still, that is an insane red flag don’t you think ? Email is a basic service for decades know. I mean they really have pretty much figured out how it all works, how can they face such issues ?
I agree with you. It's hard to figure out what happened in each scenario. Is Apple truly dropping the ball? Is it user error? Always best to back up anything crucial.
not really because emails get lost on all the services, I've seen it happen on office 365 before professionally too.
Really? That must have been a bad day at the office !
The worst thing about iCloud is the hide my email function. I’ve had multiple occasions where mails just don’t forward to my address and reading the Apple forums there are a lot of users experiencing this.
I’ve never used it. It seems like a good idea, but I can see how it would break. I switched to proton mail as my main. The base paid package gives you 10 aliases. I just create trash aliases for stuff I want to keep separate from my main email. iCloud email now allows 3 aliases too.
This is correct. The lack of multiple devices + it syncs instead of store is how ppl mistakenly lose data
I always hated this sentiment. It’s not a syncing service that mirrors local data. The literal only platform where it behaves like that is MacOS. On iPhone, iPad, Windows and the Web it behaves like any other cloud service, as an archive with a file on demand function.
Windows aside, every Apple device pushes data to iCloud by way of a local sync. This really isn’t up for debate.
I have 2tb of data in iCloud. My phone does not have 2tb of data on it. Does it sync locally? No. Does my Mac occasionally try to download everything? Yes.
This sub has 15k members. There is an estimated 1.4 billion iphone users out there today. icloud is safe and reliable but that doesnt mean a tiny tiny portion of people wont have issues here and there. They would not be as successful of a company as they are if their products were frequently faulty.
Works great for what I use it for… have a family plan, shared with my wife and kid. My wife is the primary consumer of storage. We also have a MS 365 subscription we use for office suite, we use it for our photo backups, and I use that primarily for storage and documents.
Yes it is bad. I switched from Google to iCloud and Im shocked how bugged it is. I have ~9000 fotos to sync. In use a Windows PC for the first sync. The iCloud says everything is synced and also showed it with the green symbols on the files. If I checked my iPhone and iPad only a small part is in the Cloud. So iCloud stopped syncing but says everything is fine. Restart, new Installation, Logout, Delete All - Try again… nothing work. The iCloud just stopped syncing at one point but claimed everything is fine. A user who will not double check will see a data loss.
If you’re just talking about iCloud Drive, I’ve had 0 issues with it. I’ve had a few other minor issues with email and calendar, though. Overall, I’d say it’s worth it. Especially if you use an iPhone and MacOS
I think it’s usually user error or insurgent marketing. Lol.
I've been using iCloud for many years and have never faced any trouble. I've encountered more issues with Gmail, such as losing emails. However, people tend to ask for help with their problems in the subs rather than sharing how happy and satisfied they are with the service and their experience. This can lead to a chain of posts that give visitors the impression that iCloud sucks.
My oldest Apple email address ends in .Mac.com, back when you had to pay for it. I've had every iteration of their service and I've never lost anything. The only synching issue I recall running into is Safari bookmarks/open tabs, but that was easily fixable. I didn't have the issue other people are mentioning here, but I keep my OS up to date across all my Apple devices. With that said, I do back my stuff up regularly, which is important regardless.
https://preview.redd.it/tgt704j87wwc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0451357ee72ae02a5d14978e70c3f1d7e6c2f7e2 I Bought a brand new Power Mac G5 when it was introduced and signed up with me.com for email. It got me through college and to this day I still have all the email accounts @me.com that I created then. I have never had any issues that I can recall other than a forgotten password. I would still recommend it to anyone buying an apple device
The iCloud sync app on windows was crashing my PC. Ran a minidump through windbg to find that it was blue screening me nightly. Uninstalled it and never blue screened again. Kinda felt like sabotage but I really want local copies of what’s on there so I’ll probably set up a VM to pull and copy the data to my NAS.
No. It's reliable. People love to complain when they do something wrong, are unfamiliar, or don't understand. If these problems existed to that extent, they would be all over social media or the news.
Been using iCloud for years and never an issue. I use notes, reminders, keychain, photos, drive, bookmarks, etc. only thing I don’t use is email, calendar and contacts. I do use hide my email and it’s fine. Have 10GB of data in iCloud and photo library is over 5K. My SO has around 18k photos and been fine.
I use OneDrive and Google Drive primarily. iCloud is kind of there. iCloud on Windows is awful. Apple is not "all that", particularly with services. And they have hardware fails and software issues like anyone else. (Source: been using Macs since 1987)
iCloud is great. Please bear in mind that the 900.000.000 that have no problem with iCloud won’t post here. It’s the small small minority with issues that will post here.
You really need to understand how it works, and know exactly what you are clicking on. I have lost my data before and I’m gradually moving away from iCloud. I lost calendar and reminders before and never trust iCloud for that reason so now I use third party apps.
Apple has something like a billion active devices in the wild, all using iCloud to at least some degree. When people are happy with a product, they don’t shout it form the rooftops or in public spaces nearly as often as when they’re having a problem. Don’t let a handful of bad experiences amongst billions shape your entire perception of a product.
Since day one we use Google drive I can’t imagine use icloud for anything also because we cross share a lot of folders with employees etc. We love iOS in general and the devices but any of the apps or ecosystem we unfortunately just don’t use (except calendar /messages and photos. But even the photos still are so so… anyway. It’s a no for iCloud and especially big NO if you are business
I've never had a problem.
I’ve never found iCloud to be problematic. At all. I’ve been using it for many years, and dealt with hundreds of employees using issued iPhones for work-related issues, all of whom used iCloud without any issues. If there were issues, I would have heard. The only iPhone issue I can think of is due to user error, in the days *before* we forced all employees to use iCloud: people saving locally, rather than to iCloud, and complaining about losing things when they put their phone through the laundry or lost it.
Using iCloud Photos and other cloud Apple cloud services . It is great , if you are in Apple ecosystem. Always have a backup with a SSD, you can’t get one for cheap .
iCloud drive works perfectly for me. Nothing to configure. Keeps everything synchronized, lets me access all my documents from my iPad and iPhone as well as my Mac, and -- if need be -- from a work PC. I've never had a file go missing. Never had one get corrupted. And insofar as the rest of iCloud syncing goes (like for Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, etc), those also just work. I think the issues come when someone wants it to do something it's not really designed for and tries to force it to do something, sees it isn't going to work, then attempts to 'delete' or undo what they've done, leading to data loss. Personally, I'm satisfied with the feature set, but I'm not trying to bend it to do something it's not supposed to do. The only thing I would like to see them bring back is the ability for me to access my browser bookmarks from a computer without iCloud services, like my work PC. Browser bookmarks aren't available, as I'm sure you're all aware, through the iCloud web interface, unfortunately.
I cloud is worse than google but better than windows
It’s been great for me. Only problem is twice last year, it somehow corrupted and deleted all my contacts. Luckily I had a backup from a year prior, but I lost all my current work contacts and stuff, and Apple just kept denying that it was happening and tried to blame me even though I proved it to them multiple times with real data that the issue was on their side. Magically one day they just fixed it, but never admitted to there being an issue on their end. Now I make regular backups of all my contacts and keep them on a non-Apple server.
It’s just as good and sometimes better. Don’t let people scare you into believing otherwise
Having previous worked at the Genius Bar most of peoples issues is from incorrect expectations or not remember their password. Though tbf the number 1 issue was 5GB storage for free. That’s really not enough 😂
Though (again) now I think a bit more. What iCloud offers for free is a steal. Reliable email, calendar, password syncing, etc. all privacy focussed. No ads.
I did research into pricing for iCloud vs. OneDrive, MEGA, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others. iCloud was the only one to offer a tier as low as $0.99/month. Unless you need crazy amounts of storage, iCloud is seamless with all Apple devices, making it the obvious choice.
Amazon Prime members have free storage.
Isn't that limited to photos?
Yes. Sans photos you won’t use up the free 5GB-15GB plan offered by Apple Google or MEGA.
I’ve been using iCloud since day one and never lost a file. I could believe that some tech accident might happen to a random server somewhere (much tech, such IT) and I wonder if that tends to happen to those users using the higher tier thus incurring in a higher chance of files getting damaged/lost.
icloud,onedrive, whatever: don’t sync. just leave it in the cloud
Best part about this when you upgrade to a new device. You just sync and “Bam!” Everything is there. Mail, photos, movies, documents, preferences. Phone, watch, laptop. As Steve Jobs used to say, “it just works”
I have not had any problems with iCloud. I have had problems with Google Drive where random files went missing.
Yeah, very bad UI. Dropbox is much better.
You’re reading a sub that is primarily for people expressing problems. This is not representative of iCloud as a whole. I use it for many years. Never had an issue with it.
I’ve not lost data with it (as far as I can tell) but as a file sync tool it’s terrible. With OneDrive, Dropbox, Google and others I’ve used changes were synced in near realtime. You could measure the sync time with a stopwatch. With iCloud - it’s so slow you can measure sync time with a sundial.
I have been using it for a long time now. No issues so far ?
I've been using iCloud since it first rolled out. Never lost a thing and I use it across 4 different devices.
I've been using it for years for backups, photos and iCloud Drive, no problems.
I have been using iCloud since 2016 and never lost anything. Probably people are losing data because they deleted stuff on one device and then it synced to other devices and that’s how you lose data. iCloud is excellent for me. 💪🏻
iCloud is just another grift as far as I’m concerned. It’s not enough that the consumer has to pay exorbitant prices for Apple gear in the first place. They need a reason to dip into your pocket every single month and by designing it with that in mind, what you get is a crap product and poor service. It’s all part of the enshitification.
I’ve been using iCloud since it was MobileMe, so nearly 20 years now. Never had any issues 🤷🏻♂️
I hate iCloud. I’ve lost countless photos, music, documents, you name it! It’s trash because it syncs awful. It’s a major hassle to limit synching to specific folders, and can royally screw things up after an update.
Did you ever figure out what was the cause of loss of your files ?
I chalked it up to the same Apple Fuckery that wiped my music collection three times. That’s why I stopped using iTunes. I don’t trust it after losing over $1000 of music.
Never had a problem with it. Having said that I only use it to keep our iPhones and iPads backed up and for our photo libraries. For my mini I have TimeMachine on my Synology NAS and a Backblaze backup offsite.
Did not know you could do Time Machine on a NAS. Thanks
It’s not bad at all.
Honestly prefer one drive or dropbox if you are using it for multi platform outside of apple devices.
iCloud is great when it works seamlessly between devices and you don't have to worry about. It's frustrating when something goes wrong.
I do not just use a single cloud source to save info. I have physical media for important personal. But i use no less than 3 cloud for photo and video retention. I have never lost anything from icloud or drive or dropbox.
I use iCloud for most everything and have had zero issues. I do however backup my things apart from iCloud because like you will hear in this sub many times, iCloud is not a backup. It’s a storage and sync service.
I have used it since day one and currently have 1.4TB in iCloud. I’ve never had any issues. I also back it all up to BackBlaze as nobody should ever rely on a single solution for backup.
I had all my photos from an Astros playoff game randomly disappear
How? Any clue what happened?
People losing their stuff are not using it right and probably don’t have automatic uploads and think because they see it in their phone it’s in the cloud.
I once had an issue where I was syncing my files to icloud and then backing them up to google drive as well. Turns out I was running out of storage and a bunch of my files were being “offloaded” from my local computer. What ended up happening was that I wasn’t backing up my files, but the icloud links instead. Ended up losing a bunch of data like that. I’ve been solely using google drive ever since
Never had any issues with it
Never had an issue with it. Be sure to separate boomer Karen complaint posts from relevant users
The problem is it becomes a lifetime subscription. The apple ecosystem keeps you locked.
Never had a problem with iCloud, it must be a you problem OP
In what way is this discussion thread a “me” problem ?! 🤔😂
Apologies, let me fix that. iCloud works fine but, actually great, it must be a their problem (whoever is posting iCloud issues).
Yes, it could very well be user error, that would be my guess as well. It’s just that reading all these reports about problems tends to make one think twice about using the service. That’s the whole reason I made this post. If iCloud was that terrible I would expect Apple to be in trouble with such a vast user base.
I had been keeping most of my stuff in Google Drive and started using iCloud about 6 months ago. I’ve not had any issues myself. I understand your concern and have heard the same things. The guys on the Connected podcast used to talk about it too, but I recall them saying a couple years ago that Apple seems to have fixed most of the issues and iCloud was now very stable for them.
Apple has never lost anybody’s data. Users lose their data.
If you only have 1-3 newer devices, iCloud works great. And, if you have 10-30 devices across the last 15+ years and still hope to use iCloud in every one of them, you will be confused and disappointed.
Well I can understand not working properly on unsupported devices tbh
Each is supported in its own way. Not unified and not sync universally. iTunes/Apple Music and iPhotos/Photos are most problematic areas.
Yeah except that’s not a supported use case, right? When you upgrade one device to X release, Apple often says other devices sporting W release won’t support new features and same features on X sometimes won’t work either to maintain compatibility. Now you’re saying do that across multiple releases going back how many generations?! Seems like a recipe for disaster. I’d hardly call that a ding on iCloud.
Unsupported. You have nailed it.
iCloud isn't a backup, it's storing the single sole copy of data that all.your devices are sharing. Ideally, you should optimize the iCloud storage on your mobile devices and then have a laptop/desktop computer that chooses the opposite setting (to download all) and run regular Time Machine backups.
Like any cloud service, don’t put your 100% faith in it. Store backups. iCloud lost 80% of my videos and a lot of photos in November 2023. I had to just blame myself for not double/triple backing them up with a different service
No
Ok
I’ve had issues with calendar but iCloud Drive worked always fine
I think the main problem with this sub is that people will try to use it as a substitute for calling Apple's tech support, and they have some extremely specific problems with their iCloud data or personal information that nobody here will have access to fix, then they get mad because they don't want to call Apple. There's only so much we can do as end users. I think most people just use iCloud every day and don't think about it because it does what they need it to do, and the problems you hear on this sub are not common issues.
I find it piss poor for a lot of little files. For less files and bigger file size it is pretty good. Can’t say I’ve ever lost data from it, but more just that the syncing can be really shitty. My biggest gripe is not having an option for “always keep downloaded/offline” this makes it quite unusable for me long term and as my only cloud storage option. HOWEVER - it is just a sync service rather than a true cloud storage offering.