I have iCloud+ on a family plan. Gives me Apple TV, Music, Fitness and 2TB of storage. I use it to back up all my photos (with a process to back them up to my local NAS as well as additional cloud storage - AWS Glacier)
I’m on a Mac all day and have an iPhone and iPad, so it works for me.
Some alternatives might be cheaper, but the integrations are too good to pass up.
Exactly the same. Photos in all devices (except work, obvs) file shared on iCloud is on all devices, I’m hooked into the ecosystem now.
I use iCloud for photos, shared albums and device backups. It just works, configure and forget. I am on a 200 Gb plan, for four devices.
Just use iCloud with the encryption enabled
iCloud is good, I use it to back up everything outside of my photos since that would exceed my 5gb limit
I use iCloud with family plan. I also get Apple Music, AppleTV+ and Arcade. I did have Buffalo NAS but found cloud easier and didn’t really trust that NAS. All important stuff (apart photos) I backup to local ssd. I probably should backup photos as well.
Apple One bundle and Backblaze for my desktop as a just in case.
This is EXACTLY my setup too! Very pleased with both.
I’ve started using iCloud fully since they implemented end-to-end encryption, other than that I wouldn’t recommend keeping any (sensitive) data in the cloud if it’s not E2EE
Right now I use Google One (G-Drive, Photos, etc) on a 200 GB plan because I share this with a really good friend of mine who needs Google Drive storage, and with this I get a VPN on my phone as included with the plan. I also would use iCloud+ on a 50 GB plan merely for backup and the other really useful features such as Hide My Email and Private Relay. Also I would store pretty important data on my iCloud as I do have Advanced Data Protection on which essentially end to end encrypts my iCloud data which is really useful.
For personal use, I would definitely recommend iCloud for its simplicity and ease of use. Overall, I think cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Azure, AWS S3, Google Drive are very convenient tools for storing data - whether for personal use or for a business.
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I switched everything to a private nextcloud instance for better privacy and it’s also platform agnostic. Of course you can’t backup your phone to it but everything else works perfectly. iCloud deleted 10 years of my photos all gone. I don’t trust them anymore.
I have an iPhone, but I feel like iCloud is slow, and the software is designed to consume storage on low-value files while obscuring ways to reduce usage. This likely drives iCloud subscriptions, so they have not made improved it. With that said, owners of multiple Apple products and users of bundled Apple One probably find the service great or at least convenient.
I like Google Photos (i.e. Google Drive) because it can backup an iPhone easily and comes with 15GB free. If you delete bad photos and photos you won’t miss, it can last a long time. The search and share functions within Google Photos are better, and I find Google cloud services are faster. I minimize what I back up to iCloud so 5 GB works OK.
I use my personal Dropbox account, but I also get free 5TB with Onedrive through work, and I’m paying a significant amount yearly ($180?) for 2TB through Dropbox. It may be time to switch, they aren’t so different I feel that the price is worth it to stick with Dropbox anymore.
