What you can do with iCloud storage (2024)

FAQs

What can I do with my iCloud storage? ›

You can use iCloud storage to keep photos, videos, device backups, and more, and keep this content up-to-date across your devices. When your iCloud storage is almost full or full, you might get an alert and you can buy more.

From your device's settings app, navigate to iCloud and select Manage Storage. At the top of the screen, you'll see a bar chart of what types of files are filling your available iCloud space. For most Apple users, backups, photos, and messages can take up half of your storage space or more.

Limited backup configuration options. Security - While encrypted, proprietary backup format gives less visibility into stored data. Requires trusting Apple's security methods. Reliability - Backups depend on having reliable Internet connectivity.

iPhone storage and iCloud storage are two different things- in simple terms it means that you gave too much stuff on your actual phone and it's using up all the storage- you can always check and see what is taking up the space- from my experience it's usually photos or music- Seeing you have iCloud storage make sure ...

The connectivity between iPhone and iCloud means that if you delete a picture on your iPhone, it's also removed from iCloud. Luckily, there are a few workarounds that allow you to delete photos from your iPhone yet keep them in the cloud in perpetuity.

Use iCloud

If your iPhone is set to backup to iCloud, you might be able to recover deleted text messages using a recent backup. This will revert your iPhone back to the point when you made that backup, meaning that while it can help you recover the text message, you might lose some other data.

Your device can fill up quickly depending on the size of its storage capacity and how much content you have. If you see a message that your device's storage is full, you can free up space by using iCloud Photos or deleting content on your device.

Other cloud storage services can back up and sync photos from Apple devices, granted, but then the synced copy is in another location, not the Photos app. For many people, being able to keep photos in the Photos app is reason enough to pay for an iCloud subscription. Beyond that, iCloud+ offers a few security features.

The more photos, videos, files, and text messages you want to back up, the more space you'll need. If you're just purchasing the plan for yourself, most people will find 50GB to be sufficient. If you need a plan for your whole family of avid iPhone and Mac users, you might find that you need 200GB or 2TB.

What happens when iPhone storage is full? ›

If your device is low on storage or has storage full, it automatically frees up space while installing an app, updating iOS or iPadOS, downloading music, recording videos, and more, To make more storage available, your device may also remove items that can be downloaded again or aren't needed anymore.

Is there a free version of iCloud? Yes. The first time you sign in to an iPhone, iPad, or Mac with your Apple ID, you'll get 5GB of free iCloud storage. This allows you to back up your data and keep your personal information in sync across your devices and at iCloud.com.

iCloud backups don't include: Data that you already store and sync in iCloud, like Contacts, Calendars, and Notes. Photos, if you turned on iCloud Photos. iMessages, text (SMS) and multimedia (MMS) messages, if you sync messages with iCloud.

The purpose of iCloud is so you can access your data across all of your Apple devices. However, a large portion of people either don't have another Apple device, or don't need to be storing that much data in the cloud.

Your iCloud data is encrypted, the encryption keys are secured in Apple data centers so we can help you with data recovery, and only certain data is end-to-end encrypted. Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is an optional setting that offers our highest level of cloud data security.

Firstly, you can check your iCloud storage usage and delete unnecessary data or backups, reset your iCloud settings, optimize iCloud Photo Library, and disable unnecessary app backups.