iCloud EXPLAINED! Here's what you need to know!

there's a part of the Apple ecosystem that I've not touched on in all the years that I've been working on this channel but I get asked about a lot in the comments and that's iCloud is something that I reckon we all use every day as Apple users yet a huge number of people find it really confusing and to be fair that's because Apple make it way more confusing than it needs to be so in this video I'm going to explain what iCloud is and what it isn't I'll debunk some myths and try and answer some frequently asked questions so that hopefully by the end of this video iCloud will be a tool that you can use with confidence to get the most out of it rather than be confused by okay let's get into it possibly the most important thing to understand when it comes to iCloud is that iCloud is not designed as a cloud storage solution this might sound crazy to you because ultimately it's storage for data and it's in the cloud so how can I possibly sit here and tell you that iCloud is not a cloud storage solution the answer lies in the way in which you're going to be using iCloud and understanding how Apple intend for you to use iCloud versus a service like Dropbox for example Dropbox explained the service in the first line on their website it's the choice for storing and sharing your most important files if you have electronic files whether that's photos or videos or documents like PDFs Word files or pretty much anything else you can put them into Dropbox and know that they're safe and secure there and you can then use the tools built into Dropbox to share those files with other people to work collaboratively on documents or let other people view photos all that good stuff you put something in Dropbox and so long as you continue to pay your monthly fee if you go back to it couple of years later the files would still be there ready for you to download and Dropbox also employs a certain degree of device synchronization so if I install the Dropbox client on my MacBook Air and I put a photo into my Dropbox folder there it will then upload that file to the cloud and if I were then to go to my MacBook Pro and check out the same Dropbox folder I could view the file in there as well but in general Dropbox is more about manually putting files into a specific part of your computer or your phone hence the name in order for the software to be able to sync and back up that file iCloud on the other hand is all about bringing the overall Apple experience together seamlessly in Apple's mind your iPhone iPad and Mac are just different tools used to access the same data the same experience depending on where you are and what you're doing you can see this if you download an app like pages on all your Apple devices it's essentially the same word processing app regardless of whether you use it on your iPhone or your iPad or your Mac nowhere is this more apparent than with photos and videos to illustrate this here's a photo that I took on my daily driver iPhone this is an iPhone 14 pro and I got this picture when I was out walking the dog I'm quite fortunate because of what I do for a living I have a number of Apple devices and the whole point of iCloud is that seconds after this picture is taken my iPhone is going to automatically upload it to the cloud without me doing anything it just happens in the background this does two things it backs the photo up but it also means that long before I get home from my dog walk the photo is available able for me to view on the photos app on my iPad on my Mac Studio on my MacBook Air even on my Apple TV or my watch but this is where the service differs from something like Dropbox not only is the photo visible in your photos app but the photo library is identical on your different devices again without you doing anything if you then take your iPad for example and snap a photo on that or import a photo from a camera that image will then be visible on all your other devices including your iPhone all of your devices feed into and pull data from iCloud even though you might own lots of different Apple devices you've got one iCloud which is recreating that same experience no matter which device you pick up here's a really important thing you need to understand let's say that I'm now sitting with my Mac working on that and I open the photos app and see the photo in there and I think well I don't want that photo here taking up space on my Mac I only want it on my iPhone so I right click and I delete the photo keep in mind you're not looking at your max photo library you're looking at your iCloud photo library you just happen to be viewing it on your Mac so if you delete it here you delete it everywhere including the cloud so the way in which you need to think about iCloud certainly in terms of data is that it's like having a single overarching Cloud that's accessible regardless of the device that you're using the way in which you access that cloud is going to vary depending on your device and what you're trying to access so from iCloud you've got loads of services like photos and iCloud drive and iCloud keychain and lots of others that we'll talk about in this video in short iCloud stores a lot if I open my iPhone I can tap into settings then tap on my Apple ID then tap on iCloud and then under apps using iCloud I can tap on show all and you can see for yourself everything that's included here as we've already mentioned and as I think most people will make use of iCloud will store the photos and videos that you capture on your connected Apple devices and they're stored in your photos app iCloud Drive stores all of your documents either documents that you've created using the iWork Suites like Pages numbers and Keynotes or documents that you've imported into files things like PDFs zip files word or Excel files or really any type of digital file there is a 50 gigabyte limit per file and you can't use it to store things like Library files mail messages contacts and calendar syncs across all your devices as do first party productivity apps like reminders notes and freeform so when you put a reminder on your iPhone and then you notice it on your iPad for example that's iCloud working in the background any health data that you input on your phone will sync to the cloud and as of iPad OS 17 you'll be able to view and edit that data in the dedicated Health app for iPad and changes will be reflected across all devices passwords and login information are stored in iCloud keychain as well as browser information in Safari things like your bookmarks favorites and even profiles when iOS 17 releases many of Apple's first party apps like stocks news books Game Center TV and more use iCloud to keep everything in sync for you and if a third-party app offers iCloud sync that data will also be stored securely in your iCloud account and of course backups of your devices are stored in the cloud by the way if you're enjoying the content here why not consider signing up to my newsletter the proper weekly which you can do via the link in the description of this video or by scanning the QR code on screen now the newsletter goes out each Friday and I include some tech news from the week behind the scenes of what's Happening Here on the channel as well as a tip for an item in the Apple ecosystem one of the most common misconceptions I see when it comes to iCloud is people getting iCloud and iCloud Drive confused think of it hierarchically iCloud is the cloud service that sits up top and then has all of these Services branching off from it of which photos is one iCloud keychain is one iCloud Drive is one and they all exist because they leverage iCloud iCloud Drive is like the photos app on your iPhone but for files it's a place where you store digital content that's immediately accessible on all your different Apple devices the difference is that rather than storing specifically photos and videos which you can store here by the way just to confuse things even further iCloud Drive is designed for files like word processing documents spreadsheets slide decks PDFs and most other similar files you can store photos and videos here if you wish you're just better off storing them in the dedicated photos app instead to illustrate how this works here's a PDF that I've got stored locally on my Mac I'm going to open finder and then drop the PDF into iCloud drive it's a deliberately small PDF so it won't take long for this to upload but then if I grab my iPhone which is logged into the same iCloud account I can then open the files app and you can see the PDF right there and ready for me if I right click on this file on my Mac notice that we've got two options for removing this file we can move it to the bin or we can remove the download if we move it to the bin the file will be removed from my Mac but also iCloud so this will no longer be visible here on my Mac or anywhere the file is deleted alternatively if you choose remove download you're going to remove the physical file from here on your Mac which will free up space here on my Mac but it will stay in the cloud accessible on all your devices you'll know this has happened if you see a cloud icon with a little arrow pointing down tapping on that icon will download the file to your computer but so we're double clicking to open it up like I mentioned earlier this is one of those annoying things where the feature to remove downloads exists here in iCloud drive but not in photos your computer is generally pretty good at managing all of this by itself it learns that if you've got files that you're opening and editing on a regular basis it will generally keep those on your machine whilst also syncing it to the cloud but files that you rarely ever use or haven't touched in a long time will be offloaded in general because of the way iCloud Drive is designed you'll probably manage most of your iCloud Drive data from within other apps so for example when I create the PDFs for my videos which you can access for five dollars a month via the link in the description of this video by the way I open up pages I create a new document and I choose the pages folder in my iCloud drive as the place to store the document because I create them in iCloud Drive rather than say in my downloads folder or a folder that's local to my computer only it means that I can start the project here on my Mac Studio but then I could grab my MacBook Air or my iPad or even my iPhone and pick up right where I left off plus any changes that I make would be immediately synced to the cloud and therefore all my devices notice in this folder you can see the sizes of these documents and some of them are really large all of these files are synced to the cloud because they're in my iCloud drive but you can see that these files are only in the cloud not stored locally these ones up top are both in the cloud and stored locally on this machine so if I wanted a way to save some space on this computer I could select all of these right click and choose remove downloads again this removes the files from here on this computer but the files still exist in the cloud deleting them from this folder would delete the files altogether I'm going to keep stressing that as it is the number one mistake I see people making with iCloud a question I get asked all the time is why if I create a new album in photos and move photos there do the photos still show in my all photos tab and the reason for this is that all photos is exactly what it sounds like it's your messy unorganized shoebox under the bed storage for all your images yes you can then go and create albums but those albums are basically collections of content taken from your all photos box which is why they still exist in that if you put a photo in an album then go and delete the photo from your old photos it's deleted including from the album that you just put it in there's one exception to this Rule and that's the shared photo albums so here in the photos app let's say that I tap the plus button in the upper left of the screen and choose new shared album I would give the album a name then choose next and then I would add anyone that I'd like to invite to this album although you can skip that if you wish and just tap create even though it's called a shared album you don't actually have to share it with anyone the album is now created and if you tap into it then tap the plus button you can begin selecting photos and videos from your own photo library to add to the shared album you could then quite safely delete the images from your all photos collection because the images are still in the cloud but in the shared albums instead the entire point of a shared album is that you're probably going to share it with other people and ideally they're going to add content to it also my wife and I create one each time we go on holiday and every day we just add all the pictures that we've taken to create one giant album that we can both look at whenever we like I could therefore go through my photo library and delete the images in my all photos and they'll remain in the shared album I don't bother with this personally because I trust my phone to do a good enough job at optimizing the storage but this could be a method that you could use for having a bit more control over how you manage and organize your photos but as ever remember that if you delete the photos from the shared album or if you delete the shared album entirely those photos are gone and also remember that if you create a shared album it is still using up space on your iCloud storage even if you remove the photos from your phone so this isn't a hack for getting free iCloud storage or anything like that another function of iCloud is to store backups of your various different devices so let's say for example that I'm out with my iPhone and I lose it and can't get it back I buy a new phone I can use iCloud to download the latest backup of that phone to my new handset now keep in mind that iCloud photos and iCloud Drive are both separate from device backups and keep in mind that all of the apps things like notes reminders freeform news messages although they do store data in the cloud that's also separate you might be forgiven for wondering a what does a backup of a phone or iPad actually contain and B is there any point in having one the answer to B at least is yes because a backup is going to save you a lot of time and effort if we head to Apple's support page they tell you exactly what's kept in a device backup it's data about your device's settings home screen layouts and app organization it's things like your Apple watch backups because your watch gets paired with your iPhone so the backup for that is kept within your iPhone backup it's updated for various different apps but it's also photo and video backups if you're not using iCloud photos although honestly I'd recommend that you enable iCloud photos for Simplicity it's messages if you're not using messages in iCloud so you can see that if you're someone who generally makes use of iCloud device backups are a convenience more than anything else saving you from having to mess around in settings to enable iCloud backups go into settings tap on your Apple ID at the top of the screen and then find your device in the list down at the bottom of this page tap on your device and ensure that iCloud backup is enabled You may wish to disable backup over mobile data I've got an unlimited data plan so I'm not worried about this in general my iPhone is going to back up at night over Wi-Fi another common misconception here is that backups are created new and add to Old backups clogging up your iCloud storage this isn't the case at all any new backups overwrite the old ones so you should only ever have one backup per device in your iCloud storage so every Apple ID comes with five gigabytes of free storage from Apple that's every Apple ID not every Apple device so one of the tools that I use for my video creation is a burner account I created a separate Apple ID with fake information and it's full of photos that I don't care if people see in my videos and notes that don't contain any personal information fake contacts and all that kind of stuff because it makes my life easier when I'm creating these videos I created this burner account for free with apple and it came with five gigabytes of iCloud space that I can use to upload photos and videos documents in iCloud Drive backups everything we've already talked about five gigabytes is not a lot of data these days the key night amongst you might have noticed that on my real account my iPhone backups are about five gigabytes by themselves so you can see how this data gets eaten up pretty quickly and honestly this is deliberate by Apple they want to give you just enough data so that you can experience the benefits of it but not enough that you can stay a free member for too long the good news is that iCloud space is cheap now you could head into settings then your Apple ID then iCloud then manage account storage and you can see that on my real account 262 gigabytes of space is dedicated to my photo library so if this bothered me I could go into photos and I could be ruthless and delete some content from in there to free up some space or I could access photos on my Mac and grab a load of pictures and videos and pull them across to an external drive or upload them to a different storage provider this by itself isn't a bad idea by the way just to ensure that your precious photos and videos are being stored in more than one place but honestly what I would recommend most people do is pay for some more storage you can see on my burner account if I tap into change storage plan I can get 50 gigabytes for a pound a month 200 gigabytes for three pound a month and two terabytes for nine pounds a month if you'd prefer to get on the manual route of deleting iCloud storage it's all here in manage account storage but do of course be aware that if you delete anything it is gone for good icloud.com is basically the web interface that you use to access much of what we've talked about here today via the web you would navigate to icloud.com and log in with your Apple ID and password once logged in you can do a surprising amount you can access your iCloud Mail as well as view your contacts calendar notes and reminders you can view and work in the iWork Suite of apps that's Pages numbers and Keynotes you can use find my to find your devices you can view your photos and videos in the photos app and your files in the Drive app you can also view your storage usage and make changes to your plan here if you wish you can access data recovery where you've got 30 days to restore any files that you might have deleted from iCloud icloud.com is really useful but it's one of those there if you need it types of services I tend not to use it because I'm really embedded into the Apple ecosystem and all the work I do is on an Apple device but if I was having to jump between an Apple device and an Android phone or a Windows PC for example it would be really useful to me keep in mind everything that you do on icloud.com is going to be in your browser so totally online in other words if you download and change anything you then have to upload it again to ensure iCloud is up to date sign up for a paid version of iCloud you also get access to iCloud plus features iCloud private relay is designed to make it more difficult for companies to build a profile about you based on things like your IP address location and browsing history it's different to a VPN but it offers some degree of the protection that a VPN would offer you hide my email allows you to create unique random email addresses that automatically forward to your inbox this is actually really useful I've used this a bunch of times where I maybe want to sign up for something but I'd prefer to not use my actual email address homekit secure video allows compatible cameras to be viewed within the home app on all your devices and for the footage to be analyzed by your home hub to allow for human detection all that kind of stuff it would be a great feature had Apple not totally neglected it these past few years so there you go hopefully that clears up much of the confusion surrounding iCloud if you're interested in videos about specific apps within the iCloud ecosystem like drive and photos check out my channel there's loads on there and let me know in the comments if you're still unsure about anything and as ever if you found this video useful do please consider leaving me a like and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future see you on the next video

Channel: Proper Honest Tech

Views: 347,364

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Id: flAVZHpwDwg

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023