Before you dive in and start setting up and using this mysterious thing called iCloud, you should take a few moments to get your bearings and understand what you’re dealing with.
In addition to explaining what you can and cannot do with iCloud, this chapter discusses what you need to know About iCloud System Requirements, About Your Apple ID, and About iCloud Storage.
While iCloud has a few features in common with other online services such as Dropbox, Google Docs, and Microsoft 365, iCloud is designed to achieve different goals, making it more different from these services than alike. In fact, it’s rather hard to put a finger on exactly what iCloud is.
iCloud doesn’t have much…thingness. It’s not a physical object you can touch, and it’s not software you can install. It’s not a website—at least, not entirely. You can’t buy it, although you may pay for extra features. In fact, referring to iCloud as a single entity is misleading. The name iCloud is just an arbitrary label for a collection of features, services, settings, and APIs (application programming interfaces), joined by a thread of relying on communication over the internet between Apple devices (Macs, iOS and iPadOS devices, Apple TVs, HomePods, and Apple Watches) and Apple’s servers in the cloud.
Perhaps a more interesting question to begin with is “What is iCloud for?” I have a few answers to that one:
iCloud lets iOS and iPadOS devices stand alone. Originally, the only way to move certain kinds of data on and off your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch was to connect it to a Mac or PC—at first, with a USB cable, and later, via Wi-Fi. The computer was required to activate the device; to back up or restore its data; to sync photos, music, movies, books, and apps; to transfer documents to and from certain apps; and to install operating system updates.
With iCloud, your iOS or iPadOS device can operate as a completely standalone product. If you don’t have a Mac or PC to connect to, there must be some other repository for your data, and some other mechanism to get it to and from your device. iCloud serves those purposes, letting you transfer data to and from Apple’s servers using either a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.
iCloud helps your devices integrate with each other. If you have more than one digital device—say, two Macs; or a PC and an iPhone; or an iPhone, an iPad, and an Apple Watch; or an iPad and an Apple TV—it’s only natural to want all your devices to share data.
With iCloud, syncing encompasses many kinds of data and requires less effort than before. In fact, the word “sync” almost becomes an anachronism; for the most part, iCloud pushes new or changed data almost instantly to all your devices. You can switch between devices with impunity, knowing your data is always wherever you need it.
Most cloud services work the opposite way around: data is centrally stored and only pushed to devices as needed, rather than intentionally stored there most or all of the time.
iCloud replaces (some) local storage with streaming. Related to the last point, iCloud reduces the need to keep all your important media on all your devices. As long as you have a good wireless internet connection, your Mac and iOS/iPadOS devices can now do what the Apple TV has done for many years: fetch the content you want from the cloud in near real time. This makes it practical to get by with less storage space. You also no longer have to decide which content to put on which device; in a sense, everything can be everywhere, automatically. Yet you can still store local copies of crucial data for times when an internet connection is unavailable.
iCloud facilitates (limited) sharing. Although sharing data between people is not one of iCloud’s biggest strengths, iCloud does help in certain categories. For example, Family Sharing enables family members to easily share purchases, photos, a calendar and reminder list, location information, and more. iCloud Drive lets you send read-only or read-write links to selected files and folders, or even permit others to collaborate with you in real time using iWork apps. And Mail Drop lets Apple Mail (on all platforms) send ginormous email attachments without overloading either the sender’s or recipient’s mail server.
iCloud increases security and convenience. With Find My, iCloud lets you not only locate a wayward device, but if necessary, also lock it remotely or even erase its data securely. Find My, which encompasses the old Find My Friends, also lets you find other people with iOS or iPadOS devices. And even if you find yourself without any Apple device at your disposal (unthinkable!), you can get to your email, contacts, calendars, and more (or find your wayward Mac or iOS/iPadOS device) from nearly any computer with an internet connection and a web browser.
iCloud is infrastructure. Apple designed iCloud to be mostly invisible; you shouldn’t have to think much about iCloud day to day. With everything working correctly, iCloud functions in the background, hopefully like your home’s electrical wiring or plumbing, transporting the right bits to the right places without any manual intervention. You’ll notice iCloud’s effects—increased ease of use, less aggravation, more flexibility—even if you’re not conscious of interacting with it deliberately.
iCloud constantly gains and loses features over time due to Apple’s changing priorities and as its hardware and software evolve. But as of August 2020, here are its major features, all of which I discuss later:
Media syncing: Even without iCloud, you can buy music, apps, or books from Apple on any Mac, PC, or iOS/iPadOS device and have them automatically pushed to all your other devices. You can also re-download previously purchased media (including TV shows and movies) from any of your devices.
An optional paid feature, iTunes Match, extends media syncing to work with music from sources other than the iTunes Store. iTunes Match is separate from Apple Music, but both use the same mechanism to sync tracks across your devices. (If you subscribe to Apple Music, there’s no utility in also paying for iTunes Match.) See Use iCloud Music Features.
Family Sharing: iCloud Family Sharing lets families of up to six people link their individual accounts in a way that gives each person access to most apps and media purchased by the others, and, starting in late 2020, in-app purchases and subscriptions; a shared calendar, reminder list, and photo album; and location information. Family members can use a single credit card for all Apple media purchases, and children can use the Ask to Buy feature to get parental approval for downloads. And if you’re paying for 200 GB or 2 TB of iCloud storage, you can even share that space with other family members. See Use iCloud Family Sharing.
iCloud Photos: Continuing with the theme of automatically propagating data, iCloud Photos (formerly called iCloud Photo Library) lets you sync all your photos and videos (including your People album) across all your Apple devices. A feature called My Photo Stream pushes new photos (but not videos) you take with your iOS or iPadOS device, as well as photos you import from your camera onto your computer or mobile device, up to the cloud and then down to other devices. My Photo Stream works with Photos on a Mac, and it also works in Windows, but it’s otherwise more limited than iCloud Photos. Shared Albums extends the photo stream concept, allowing you to share albums (containing photos and videos) with others as well as stream photos from iCloud to an Apple TV. You can also share individual photos or videos. See Manage Your Photos.
Syncing documents and app data: iCloud Drive provides centralized cloud storage for your documents, synced automatically across your devices, making those documents available from within supported apps, the Mac’s Finder, and the Files app in iOS and iPadOS. It’s not quite like Dropbox, but it’s in the ballpark. In addition, some apps that don’t use documents per se can take advantage of iCloud’s infrastructure for storing and syncing other data, such as preferences and database entries. See Keep Documents and App Data in Sync.
Desktop and Documents folder sync: iCloud Drive can also sync the Desktop and Documents folders from a Mac to Apple’s servers, and from there to other Macs, as well as making all that data available on your iOS or iPadOS device and in the iCloud Drive web app on the iCloud website. And, it can optionally delete older files from your Mac if you start running low on space, while enabling you to download them again later whenever you need them. See Sync Your Desktop and Documents Folders (or Don’t).
Sharing documents and folders: Not only can you store stuff for yourself on iCloud Drive, you can also share files and folders with others—either read-only or read-write. See Share Files and Folders on a Mac or PC.
Calendar, Contacts, Home, Mail, News, Notes, Reminders, Safari browser data, Stocks, and Voice Memos: With this set of apps and services, iCloud keeps your personal data in sync among your devices, and lets you access much of this data from any web browser. In addition, Mail Drop, a feature in Apple Mail for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and the Mail web app, uses iCloud to simplify sending large attachments. See Keep Mail, Contacts, and Calendars in Sync and Sync Other iCloud Data.
Messages in iCloud: iCloud can sync all your iMessage and SMS conversations from Messages across your devices. See Sync Messages.
Other app data: You can sync Siri across your devices, so that what Siri learns about you on one device can inform its responses to you on other devices. And, you can sync data from the Health app (iPhone only) to other iPhones. See Sync Data from Other Apps.
Universal Clipboard: Merely by having two more Macs, iOS, or iPadOS devices signed in to the same iCloud account, you can copy or cut something on one device and paste it on another. See Use Universal Clipboard.
iCloud Keychain: iCloud Keychain securely syncs passwords, credit card numbers, and account information among devices. It includes other features, too, such as a random password generator built into Safari. And third-party apps can also access items in your iCloud Keychain. See Work with iCloud Keychain.
icloud.com: Apple’s iCloud website contains web apps, accessible from nearly any browser, that let you work with many types of data—email, contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, photos, and iCloud Drive documents—as well as web-based versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. See Use the iCloud Website.
Find My: The Find My app shows you the exact location of any of your Apple devices; you can even remotely lock or wipe any of these devices. You can also locate friends—via their iOS/iPadOS devices or Series 3 or later Apple Watches—who have given you permission to follow them. And a clever crowdsourcing feature lets Find My securely discover the location of your lost or stolen hardware even if the device lacks an active internet connection. See Find My Nouns.
iCloud Backup: iCloud securely and automatically backs up all the personal data from your iOS and iPadOS devices to Apple’s servers and lets you restore it over the air. See Back Up and Restore iOS/iPadOS Data.
Apple TV: Your Apple TV can access not only any media you purchased on your other Apple devices but also your Music library, iCloud Photos, My Photo Stream, and photo streams shared with you by others. See Use iCloud on an Apple TV.
Since iCloud is a heterogeneous collection of services and capabilities, it doesn’t have a fixed set of system requirements. Some aspects of iCloud require at least iOS 13, 10.15 Catalina, Windows 10, or an Apple TV HD or Apple TV 4K with tvOS 13 or later; although many services are supported as far back as iOS 5, 10.7.5 Lion, the second-generation Apple TV, or Windows 7. Other parts of iCloud are accessible from nearly any web browser or from any of numerous third-party apps.
Of course, Apple would prefer you to have the latest version of everything, and, as I mentioned in the Introduction, this book largely assumes that you do. But the fact that you’re still running, say, 10.6 Snow Leopard doesn’t mean iCloud is closed to you. For full compatibility details, see Apple’s System requirements for iCloud page.
One thing that page doesn’t tell you, however, is what you’ll need to access email, contacts, and calendars using third-party client software. So here are the details:
Email: Any IMAP client with SSL support, on any platform, should be able to connect with your iCloud email account. The server addresses may be different from what you expect, however; see the sidebar Access iCloud Mail with Other Email Clients.
Calendars and Contacts: iCloud uses standard protocols: CalDAV for calendars and CardDAV for contacts. However, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, not all CalDAV and CardDAV clients can connect to iCloud accounts.
BusyCal and BusyContacts are the only third-party Mac apps I’m aware of that can connect to iCloud for calendar and contact syncing, respectively. Under Windows, eM Client also supports iCloud calendars and contacts.
To use iCloud, you need a username called an Apple ID, which identifies you across numerous Apple products and services. You probably already have an Apple ID, and if not, it’s easy (and free) to get one.
Although Apple once allowed any unique name to be an Apple ID, now they require all Apple IDs to be email addresses. If you already have an email address ending in @icloud.com, @me.com, or @mac.com, that’s an Apple ID for sure. If you used a different email address when buying something from Apple, registering for an Apple developer program, or using any of several other Apple services, that address is also an Apple ID. If you aren’t sure whether you have an Apple ID or whether a certain address is an Apple ID, check it at the Apple ID “iForgot” site.
That’s all fairly straightforward, but iCloud’s reliance on Apple IDs has several consequences that may not be apparent—for example, you might have more than one Apple ID and not know which one to use for iCloud, or you might share an Apple ID with someone else. Read on to find out what to do about cases like these.
In a perfect world, each person would have exactly one Apple ID, all the person’s data and purchases would be associated with it, and the question of which Apple ID to use where wouldn’t come up. However, for a variety of reasons, a great many people have accumulated more than one personal Apple ID over the years.
Apart from the clutter of multiple accounts and having one’s data in several places, there’s one big practical problem with having multiple Apple IDs. Whereas you can copy personal data, such as contacts and email messages, from one account to another, you can’t do the same thing with purchases. Once you’ve made a purchase from Apple with a given Apple ID, the purchase is tied to that ID permanently. You can’t transfer a purchase to a different Apple ID, and you can’t merge two Apple IDs in order to consolidate your purchases into one account.
iCloud Family Sharing (see Use iCloud Family Sharing) mostly erases the irritation of purchases under multiple Apple IDs within a family. Each person signs in with an individual Apple ID, but because they’re all linked (up to six of them), each family member can access most purchases the others have made.
But if Family Sharing isn’t appropriate for your situation—namely, you need to share purchases with someone who’s not in your family—you can often work around the problem. Although Music, the Mac App Store, the iOS or iPadOS App Store, and the Book Store can each log in with only one Apple ID at a time, you can switch between IDs without losing any content. In the relevant app, find the Sign Out button or menu command, and then sign back in with the other account. Note that doing so requires you to know (or have someone else enter) the password for the other account.
Some people have multiple personal Apple IDs because they have more than one iCloud account that they need to keep separate—perhaps a home account and a work account, or a personal account and a club account. Others register different Apple IDs for different countries in which they live or travel to for extended periods. It is possible to sign in to multiple iCloud accounts on a Mac at the same time, although as I explain ahead shortly, doing so carries a few restrictions.
All that said, which Apple ID should you use when you set up iCloud? Here are my suggestions. If you have…
A single, personal Apple ID: That’s the one to use—Done!
A single, shared Apple ID: Create a new Apple ID for yourself. Afterward, you can go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts and add the shared Apple ID as a secondary account (see Work with Multiple iCloud Accounts).
Multiple individual Apple IDs: Use the Apple ID associated with whichever you consider your primary or personal account—the one that contains most of your data. Later, you can go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts (or, in iOS/iPadOS, Settings > Accounts & Passwords > Add Account) and add one or more secondary iCloud accounts—for example, to sync shared contacts or to provide access to another email account.
Note, however, that any iCloud account you sign in to after the first one can be used on that particular device only for email, contacts, calendars, reminders, and notes; it can’t access Safari data, photos (iCloud Photos, My Photo Stream, and Shared Albums), iCloud Drive, iCloud Keychain, or Find My Device. (I say more about this later, in Use Multiple iCloud Accounts on a Mac and Work with Multiple iCloud Accounts.)
So, for example, if you wanted to share iCloud contacts with your spouse, the ideal way would be for each of you to configure an individual iCloud account on your respective devices, which then becomes the primary account for each device. Next, set up another iCloud account, just for contacts, which each of you adds as a secondary account on each device (see Share Your Contacts with Someone Else). You could, in theory, make another account for notes, but for any other data type, this sort of sharing either won’t work at all or is highly likely to cause problems.
A personal Apple ID plus a separate Apple ID you’ve used for shared purchases: The best way to handle this is to use only your personal Apple ID, set it up to use your preferred credit card, and add other family members to iCloud Family Sharing. If that won’t work in your situation—for example, if you use a business credit card for purchases—enter your personal Apple ID during iCloud setup. Later, you can open Music or iTunes (and the Mac App Store and Books or iBooks) and sign in with the other Apple ID you use for purchases.
One or more Apple IDs, but not an iCloud account: The process of setting up iCloud will turn your Apple ID into an iCloud account. Enter your Apple ID; if you have more than one, pick the ID that you’ve made the most purchases with. You will be prompted to provide additional information for the conversion, including selecting an email address in the icloud.com domain.
No Apple ID: If you have never had an Apple ID at all—unlikely, I realize, for users of Apple products—you can create one now at the Apple ID site. (You can use the same URL to change your password or other Apple ID details, should the need arise.)
Each iCloud account includes 5 GB of free storage space, and you can buy more if that’s not enough. Prices vary by location; in the United States, you can upgrade to 50 GB for $0.99 per month, 200 GB for $2.99 per month, or 2 TB for $9.99 per month. It’s a good thing that prices are so reasonable, because that free 5 GB doesn’t go very far.
Many types of data don’t count against that 5 GB limit. A partial list:
Purchases from the iTunes Store: Music, TV shows, movies, apps, and books don’t take up any of your personal space, because Apple already has copies of that data on their servers.
Photos outside iCloud Photos: Photos in My Photo Stream and those you’ve shared with Shared Albums don’t count, no matter how many you have or what their resolution is, presumably because that data stays in the cloud only temporarily (I explain this in Manage Your Photos).
Mail Drop attachments: Email attachments sent with Mail Drop (see Use Mail Drop) also don’t count against your quota.
HomeKit Secure Video: While you must have either a 200 GB or 2 TB iCloud storage plan to record video from supported cameras, the storage doesn’t count against your totals (nor is it directly accessible from iCloud Drive or on icloud.com).
What does count against your storage quota is documents, including everything kept in iCloud Drive; your iCloud Photos; iCloud email, including attachments sent without Mail Drop; and—if you’ve enabled iCloud Backup—each of your iOS/iPadOS devices’ personal settings, app data, locally stored photos, and a few other items that would appear at first glance to occupy little space altogether.
Those backups can require more iCloud storage than you might think. For example, at this moment my iPhone uses only 2.5 GB of space for iCloud backups but my iPad mini uses 11 GB—and remember, that’s for data that isn’t already on Apple’s servers somewhere. A backup of my iPad alone puts me well over the 5 GB limit, and I have other data I need to store in iCloud. (iCloud doesn’t require you to back up iOS or iPadOS devices to the cloud; you can back them up to your Mac or PC via the Finder or iTunes if you prefer).