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Apple Adds 6TB and 12TB iCloud+ Storage Tiers

LightProtector said:
That's insane. I never knew people would need more than 6TB, let alone 2TB.
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For an individual user not doing audio/video work in the cloud 2TB is a lot, but on a family plan that 2 TB is shared across all users so it with five heavy users that could get chewed through pretty quickly.

That's one thing I like about Microsoft's family plan - each member gets their own 1TB of OneDrive storage space.
 
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Henry Jones said:
Would anyone like to explain to me, the rest of humanity and Tim Cook how you can make use of the 12TB iCloud option when the maximum internal configured storage on Apple's machines is 8TB and Apple force the location of iCloud drive to be on your boot disk (meaning effectively 7.5TB maximum data). Is this tier entirely about backing up your family's devices?
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Yep Family Plan

Ironically I have the 2TB cloud now with 4 phones and just in the past week have hit the maximum and cannot sync photos anymore

Daughter 1 - 825 GB being used
Daughter 2 - 715 GB being used
Wife - 150 gb
Me - about 300 gb

We all have 256 gb iPhones so not sure how daughters are so large even with optimized setting on. Of course iCloud gives NO details so you can only accept what they say....
 
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NT1440 said:
My usage isn’t that much, but for peace of mind as the family IT guy I’ve put my parents, sisters, and fiancé on my iCloud+ storage. When I happen to look I’m constantly shocked by how much storage some people use…
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Hard same. We have a 200GB plan. Wife uses up 180 GB on videos and pictures. I'll force her to delete pictures before I pay $10 a month for way more storage that I don't need.
 
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We haven’t heard anything about Apple data centers in a while. I wonder if they are using there own plus Amazon & Microsoft services…
 
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CygnusTC said:
Yep Family Plan

Ironically I have the 2TB cloud now with 4 phones and just in the past week have hit the maximum and cannot sync photos anymore

Daughter 1 - 825 GB being used
Daughter 2 - 715 GB being used
Wife - 150 gb
Me - about 300 gb

We all have 256 gb iPhones so not sure how daughters are so large even with optimized setting on. Of course iCloud gives NO details so you can only accept what they say....
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The 'optimized settings' are for your local phone storage, not for data in iCloud. The images & videos stored on the phone are just low-res thumbnails. Very small in size so it'll not occupy too much spaces on the phone. When you open a pic/video, iCloud will retrieve the full-res version online (if it's not in local temporary cache already). That means you can stored more data (full-res) in the cloud than your phone's 256gb specs.
 
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Honestly, I don’t understand the whining over pricing and tiers in this thread. The price is competitive with the industry (check Google, Dropbox, Backblaze, AWS, etc). Cloud storage is expensive to maintain. We haven’t heard of data loss with iCloud and I rather want to keep it that way.
And I’m someone who both works with storage solutions at work (both cloud and on-prem, like NetApp), and play around with storage at home, both with a Synology NAS with 32TB and a custom NAS running TrueNAS with 60TB.

As for the free 5GB, I reckon 30GB or 50GB would be adequate, but I can’t imagine dealing with freeloaders and folks abusing the system. Apple was for a long time the cheapest 200GB plan (Google dropped their pricing after Apple announced theirs) and 2TB plan (when Apple launched, most other $9.99/mo options offered only 1TB).

I do wish Apple allowed us to buy multiples of a plan, without limit: 3x200GB, 2x2TB, etc. So far, I had to get Apple One and pay an extra $9.99 just to get 4TB for my Family, so 6TB for about $15/mo less than what I pay now is a welcome offer!!

—LF
 
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I may just downgrade to 50GB just for the mail and Hide my Email, Private etc. and move my storage to Dropbox... it's a lot cheaper.

DropBox is C$33 for 15TB. Come on Apple.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Plenty of cloud storage options besides this one. Do your consumer rights thing and shop around. Not all cloud storage providers are striving for $4T valuations... and storage is storage... about as commoditized as it gets. Subscription-free 20TBs of HDD storage is about to fall below $200.

OR, invest in your own cloud available on most NAS drives (just one example), so you can both fully control your own data (no for-profit middlemen) and decide how much cloud storage you want (and expand it when you need more). That will likely cost more in a one-time purchase but then be free cloud storage for as long as your NAS runs.
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I could be wrong but I don’t think Apple lets you backup your iDevices to personal media. Sure, you can offload photos to various sources, but it’s not a total solution.
 
I back up mine regularly to my Mac- no problem. Then, presumably the next Time Machine run backs that backup up to that same Synology NAS, as well as the local TM (DAS) drive. I'd have to check that TM stuff to know for sure but it seems likely based upon how TM works.

Update: just checked online and every search match confirms that TM does backup iDevice backups. So I quickly have the iDevice backup on my Mac, a backup of that backup on the Synology and another backup on the DAS TM disc too. I do not worry about losing iDevice data with my NAS cloud option.
 
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nocsi said:
lol people comparing their NAS as if its equivalent to iCloud. When your wife gets her phone stolen and you can get a new phone and restore the phone anywhere in the world w/ your NAS, then we’ll talk. Anything personal, I store on Apple’s servers.
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I’m also surprised that nobody has mentioned, “What if your house, computer, and NAS system are destroyed by fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, or earthquake?” My wife and I have local backups of the contents of our Macs, and we’re also glad to have 2TB of iCloud storage (of which we use 1.5 TB) via Apple One. I also have an external hard drive with 3TB of media files, for which I have a clone backup. I’m not sure I care about it enough to pay for the 6TB plan, because the aforementioned catastrophic disasters are unlikely, but it’s nice that Apple offers the option.
 
hansmoleman said:
Family accounts.
Macs with external storage.
Someone with multiple Macs.

Lots of ways to use that capacity.... not every use case is 1 person + 1 Mac + 1 iPhone.
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the 'Macs with external storage' is the one I'm talking about.

iCloud drive can't backup external storage. And multiple Macs doesn't make any sense either, if you tell one machine to sync to iCloud drive, and then another logs into the same iCloud drive, it's not compartmentalised. It will try to sync the same 12tb iCloud drive, whether the machine has 1tb internally or 8tb. (apart from when you set it to the don't sync everything mode). Are they about to sell a Mac with a larger internal storage or did they forget to tell people how to junction/symlink the Mobile Documents folder? From what I have read recently, Apple purposefully made it far more difficult to successfully point iCloud drive to an external disk, so the singular explanation for the 12TB tier is backing up multiple Non-Mac iOS devices e.g. family.
 
Ubele said:
I’m also surprised that nobody has mentioned, “What if your house, computer, and NAS system are destroyed by fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, or earthquake?” My wife and I have local backups of the contents of our Macs, and we’re also glad to have 2TB of iCloud storage (of which we use 1.5 TB) via Apple One. I also have an external hard drive with 3TB of media files, for which I have a clone backup. I’m not sure I care about it enough to pay for the 6TB plan, because the aforementioned catastrophic disasters are unlikely, but it’s nice that Apple offers the option.
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Easy. Along with my local TM backups (2 of them to NAS & DAS) I also regularly rotate that DAS with another Drive stored offsite in a bank safe deposit box. Furthermore, any work files which are most of the latest stuff between those rotations are also regularly copied to/from a MB too, so I have relatively small risk of losing anything unless 2 drives + 2 Macs + 1 bank are all taken out in the same event... which- if so- I probably am too, so I won't be able to care about my latest data anymore.

However, if I thought I could survive a city-wide event that took out all backups at home and the bank miles away, I could choose from a multitude of cloud services vs. only iCloud... most of which can offer equivalent storage for less cost. So if I was inclined to add one more distant backup for a citywide disaster, I'd probably choose a cloud service that costs substantially less than Apple's. Storage is storage. As long as the provider had good reviews and a good reputation, I wouldn't worry about a fifth or sixth backup I'd probably never need... or not survive to be able to tap if my whole region was obliterated.

All that shared though, I 100% agree that it's very nice that Apple also has a cloud option, very easy to use, deeply integrated in all Apple OSs, mostly "just works", etc. I don't HATE it or anything- I do use my free iCloud space for some exchanges between devices regularly. It's when it crosses into the relatively high-priced tiers that one can ALSO consider using many other offerings that will often cost less than Apple's. It's not the only sheriff in this particular town... though seemingly too many of us sure seem to think it's either Apple's cloud or bust.
 
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Good timing. I’ve got 52GB left on my 2TB iCloud Drive. Noticed it this week.

But darn, 6TB is quite a jump up. Missed opportunity to bring Time Machine into iCloud. Why are we still plugging hard drives into our Macs to update Time Machine?
 
Because after it's paid for, that backup has no forever subscription fee?

Because most broadband providers have relatively small caps, and whole Mac backups of some size would overshoot that cap and jack up broadband fees? For example, one major broadband player in America has a 1.2TB cap each month. For me anyway, just a single first backup would exceed that.

Because substantial writes & reads to the cloud is relatively slow vs. a local DAS or NAS?

Etc.

However, I get your concept and wish it could be that way without the above costs, speed hits, bandwidth caps, etc. too. The core concept and fundamental benefits of "cloud" are great. It's the profit exploitation from pretty much all players involved that undermines the attractiveness of it for some of us.
 
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As I wrote earlier today, phones are appliances.

So are watches, tablets, desktop computers and laptops.

The world is now awash with these things.

So the future (and present) of making money is in sell services.

This is an old idea (IBM) that gets reborn.

So Apple (and Amazon and Google and Microsoft and...) will put appliances into your hands/pocket/household as means of selling your services.

Storage, entertainment (music, video), etc.

That's the long term plan of being a profitable corporation for the rest of this century.

Will you go along for the ride?

(As for me, I just use freebie level on Google, and use whatever Microsoft is packaging with their 365Live service.)
 
Thanks Apple for doing this, it is one of the best news in a long time
I was tired of searching for a way to store photos and videos because my 4TB was full months ago.

I have over 250,000 photos and videos and 13,000 items not synced to iCloud because I have 0 space.

Also I could not backup my iPhone or iPad on iCloud.

I have an older iMac that works very good because I upgrade the hard drive to a ssd drive but every time I try to upload the 13,000 photos I can’t because I got an unlock iPhone error in photos.

Other option I try was to use shared photos but unfortunately they lower the quality.

The only option I have is to upgrade iCloud to store my photos, videos and have backups of my devices.

* The first photos I have on iCloud are from 11 years ago taken with the iPhone 4S, it is amazing how good was the quality.
 
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DirtyComputer said:
Anyone remotely savvy should buy a synology nas and use their drive app. At $720/year for the 12TB, in about two years it will have paid for itself(with two 20Tb drives) and you actually have versioning setup in case a file is accidentally deleted and unnoticed for 30 days. Then get a second and have an actual backup!
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Okay let’s go down this path because I really want to know and have been going over this plan in my mind.

How exactly is this going to work? So you go buy the Synology, okay. Then you get app to upload photos to your Synology. Then what? You delete those photos from your photo? And I assume you can now view thumb nail version on their app and can download when needed?

Do you have a streamline process in place already? Because I have yet to find a solution better than iCloud and google photo…
 
We have the apple one plan and we all chip in for it so £32.99 a month between 4 of us is good value considering what we get for that. We are about 1.5 Tb free at the moment but I can see some people using far more. 4k videos take up a fair chunk of room so if several of you do videos often, it will soon fill up
 
These tiers suck. 200 GB is too little, 2 TB is too much. 1 TB would be the sweet spot for most users. Apple knows this, but likes us to pay more for the 2TB-tier we don't really need.
 
oneteam said:
I need 500GB. It's a huge jump from 200GB to 2TB
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Same but I’m now stuck with 2TB 😭 but I did find friends who want to be part of my family subscription and we split the cost of 2TB lol


But seriously, I think 6TB above are for those who has 1TB of iPhones or multiply 1TB iPhones on the family and also using their iCloud as cloud based drive.
 
uniquexoxo said:
Same but I’m now stuck with 2TB 😭 but I did find friends who want to be part of my family subscription and we split the cost of 2TB lol


But seriously, I think 6TB above are for those who has 1TB of iPhones or multiply 1TB iPhones on the family and also using their iCloud as cloud based drive.
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I wonder if Apple is ever going to pull the Netflix thing and not allow family sharing if not under the same roof!
 
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