TL;DR I've had a flawless experience with El Cap and iCloud!
Amidst all the understandably negative threads, I would like to everyone know that the clean installation of El Cap on my 2013 Retina MacBook went as smoothly as it possibly could have! I backed up my photos library and my music just in case, which are the only things that I can't replace, and it turns out that after logging into iCloud I now have access to my entire iCloud Photo Library and my entire music collection without moving anything back onto my Mac!
I recently upgraded my iCloud plan to 200gb to accommodate the 115GB of photos and videos that are in Photos and I was skeptical about whether or not Apple would screw up the library in any way. Well, I've spent a good amount of time scanning through it and it appears that the entire library is intact in the cloud! This frees up a lot of space on my small 256GB SSD! The Photos library file is currently sitting at 26GB with about 1/3 of the photos left to "optimize". Even if it goes up to 60GB it's still much smaller than the previous 115GB Photos file.
Now, about the music! My iTunes Match subscription ran out about 2 weeks ago and since I have Apple Music (I love it) I didn't bother to renew it. My library mainly consists of lossless music but the freedom and hassle-free nature that I've experienced with iCloud has caused me to keep my music (about 70GB) off of my small Mac SSD. I do believe that I will keep a backup of all my music somewhere other than my Mac and just let iTunes upload/match the songs then delete the local file. Having my entire music collection at my fingertips with literally no hard drive footprint is amazing! I even checked to see if any of the songs are caching in the iTunes folder and they're not! Not to mention I can stream them on my iPhone with no apparent local caching either.
Macrumors is usually a place to gripe and groan about how Apple is doomed and Eddy Cue sucks at managing and Tim Cook is a penny pincher and Steve Jobs wouldn't approve of any of this and Apple is stretched too thin and Angela Ahrendts should be fired and the Apple Watch is a failure but my experience with El Cap and iCloud has been amazing!
Thanks for taking the time to read my little essay
Amidst all the understandably negative threads, I would like to everyone know that the clean installation of El Cap on my 2013 Retina MacBook went as smoothly as it possibly could have! I backed up my photos library and my music just in case, which are the only things that I can't replace, and it turns out that after logging into iCloud I now have access to my entire iCloud Photo Library and my entire music collection without moving anything back onto my Mac!
I recently upgraded my iCloud plan to 200gb to accommodate the 115GB of photos and videos that are in Photos and I was skeptical about whether or not Apple would screw up the library in any way. Well, I've spent a good amount of time scanning through it and it appears that the entire library is intact in the cloud! This frees up a lot of space on my small 256GB SSD! The Photos library file is currently sitting at 26GB with about 1/3 of the photos left to "optimize". Even if it goes up to 60GB it's still much smaller than the previous 115GB Photos file.
Now, about the music! My iTunes Match subscription ran out about 2 weeks ago and since I have Apple Music (I love it) I didn't bother to renew it. My library mainly consists of lossless music but the freedom and hassle-free nature that I've experienced with iCloud has caused me to keep my music (about 70GB) off of my small Mac SSD. I do believe that I will keep a backup of all my music somewhere other than my Mac and just let iTunes upload/match the songs then delete the local file. Having my entire music collection at my fingertips with literally no hard drive footprint is amazing! I even checked to see if any of the songs are caching in the iTunes folder and they're not! Not to mention I can stream them on my iPhone with no apparent local caching either.
Macrumors is usually a place to gripe and groan about how Apple is doomed and Eddy Cue sucks at managing and Tim Cook is a penny pincher and Steve Jobs wouldn't approve of any of this and Apple is stretched too thin and Angela Ahrendts should be fired and the Apple Watch is a failure but my experience with El Cap and iCloud has been amazing!
Thanks for taking the time to read my little essay
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