they're going to give you the option to add these higher tiers onto your existing subscription...
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Apple Launches New 6TB and 12TB iCloud+ Plans
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The prices can be a tough pill to swallow. But seems that $5/TB is the going rate (same as what Google charges anyway).
There's always pros and cons to everything... There are inherent risks with local storage... theft of the drive, loss, house fire, drive could fail or get damaged, etc... Also the convenience of not having to remember to physically back up all the time... I know between work, kids and life I would forget all the time. I know with cloud storage there is risk of data loss as well since these things live on a storage somewhere, but I'm sure a company like Apple has several backups and has taken all the measures to ensure data is safe.
They did increase capacities — they now offer a 6TB and 12TB plan.
But it doesn't look like this extra 2TB is shareable to the family. Meaning each person would have to add the extra 2TB when needed. Only the 6TB and the 12TB seem to be labeled as family shared. So, how does iCloud decide what goes in personal iCloud space versus what goes in family iCloud space?
I just compared pricing between Apple, Google, and Microsoft. At the free tier, Apple is the same as Microsoft. At 200 GB tier, Google and Apple are the same while Microsoft costs more as there isn't a 200 GB tier. At 2TB Google is cheapest at $9.99, then Apple at $10.99, and Microsoft offers 1TB for $69.99 a year. Once you go beyond this, only Apple and MS offer the 6 TB tier, which is shared in a M365 family plan.
As far as I can tell, there is no ripoff at any tier, just a lot of pricing that pushes you up to $10-11 mark with all three companies. If you're looking for cheap cloud storage with no hooks into an application ecosystem, you can probably do better...but this is competitive.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
OK. So this topic maxes out with the 12TB plan at $60/month. Let's buy three 12TB HDDs on Amazon right now. There are several good rated drives for under $100. But let's make it $100 to keep the math simple. $300 for 3 drives.
Use Time Machine for free to keep them all backed up. Store one offsite and regularly rotate it with one onsite. I use a $35/year bank safe deposit box to do that (but I could store it in many other places for free if I liked).
- 3 years comparison: cloud $2,160 vs. 3 HDDs + Safe Deposit $405
- 5 years comparison: cloud $3,600 vs. 3 HDD + SD $475
- 7 years comparison: cloud $5,040 vs. 3 HDD + SD $545
If you are leaning solely on iCloud for that "Global backed-up and duplicated" storage, you should also buy yourself a few drives to have that locally backed up too, on drives you fully own and control. Else, you are putting faith in complete strangers to caretake your data.
For sharing with family, small cloud storage can be great. Or I opt to own my own cloud storage for $0/month subscriptions and I can share access to some or all of it with anyone I want. Managing it is no great burden- I rarely have to do anything with it. Setup took about 30 minutes executing a step-by-step wizard ONCE.
Again, I don't fault the excellent iCloud service. It is terrific. I just don't love the relative pricing. There are OTHER options for anyone who would like many of the same benefits at less cost. Not all cloud providers demand the fat Apple margin. And one can easily set themselves up with their own cloud for not so much out of pocket and then $0 subscriptions. If so- at these prices- it doesn't take very long for the rental tally to overtake the owning tally.
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50GB is $1 a month — is this really a big deal to you?
Ok. I retract my statements. Looks like all iCloud+ is family shareable.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238
My bad.
Right, but as the size increases — the price needs to decrease — bulk. Otherwise how would stores like Costco exist?..
You're assuming these prices will stay the same across all of those years. And none of these are going to offer the convenience of iCloud.
My advice is to only upgrade to these if you find yourself needing to upgrade by hitting the maximum. If you do hit that wall, consider an option like the above but only to offload what you really don't need available in the cloud, all the time, everywhere.
It would have been nice if the base option jumped from 5GB to 10GB, but I guess there's too many devices out there for that to happen.
I haven't been able to backup my phone to the cloud, OS & select app data only ( no photos, videos, music, ... only like 2 third party apps ), for years. I only have 1 GB used on the cloud, but it won't back up. It complains every week. I think the Health & Fitness data is too much over the years.
I haven't been able to backup my phone to the cloud, OS & select app data only ( no photos, videos, music, ... only like 2 third party apps ), for years. I only have 1 GB used on the cloud, but it won't back up. It complains every week. I think the Health & Fitness data is too much over the years.
Install iCloud for Windows (if youre not a mac user). Once the files have synced to your local computer, copy them to the physical drive.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Archive or make copies of the information you store in iCloud - Apple Support
Learn how to archive or make copies of the information that you use with iCloud.
Another option, Amazon Photos is free for unlimited photo storage with Amazon Prime Subscription (which has many other benefits). The sharing from Amazon Photos works well.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
I don't feel like I put nearly ANY effort into all such issues. I use the combination of my own cloud in Synology and then Apple's Time Machine backing up to 3 drives: also Synology, 1 big HDD at home and 1 stored offsite (to address the fire/theft/flood) issue. I go to the offsite location regularly anyway, so I just swap the offsite drive for the onsite drive and then TM takes care of freshening up the backup. Time Machine requires no attention at all. It "just works."
Since most of my new files are work files, I'm regularly synching desktop Mac to/from laptop Mac, so there are pretty fresh backups between 2 Macs too.
Almost no effort... but nearly full-proof backups. ZERO subscription fees.
Again, I do use iCloud too (the free part) and Dropbox (free) and also Microsoft and Google sometimes too. I am not anti-cloud or anti-iCloud. I'm just down on the relative high cost and sharing another way to get much of the same benefit for much less cost for anyone interested. The practical answer is not to just keep renting more and more storage in the sky at higher and higher services revenue.
However, for those who rationalize the value, enjoy the service. It is great and thoroughly integrated.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Actually, my assumption is that 12TB of HDD will be cheaper in the future. I just didn't allow any discount in that math. On the other hand, I would expect 12TB of iCloud to go up over that length of time... but I didn't assume any Apple price hikes there either.
Nevertheless, assume any inflation you want into the 12TB HDDs and assume Apple chooses to reduce their revenue & profit by lowering the price to rent equivalent space over time. The difference in total cost is so great you can greatly penalize the HDD option and make Apple quite generous and it will still be a very large difference.
Have you seen how much space 4k ProRes videos take? It’s roughly 1.5GB per minute.
Occasionally I take 4K videos, which use up about 4Gigs of space. Whenever I travel, I take a ton of photos, especially flowers. It adds up
This is the perfect response that needs to be attached to every post on here that says "why not just buy a 12TB hard drive?"
I personally run 52TB of storage at home and that is backed up to another onsite 52TB array and I also have a 3rd off-site set of storage that is stored 1,100 miles away and updated once every 60 days. It takes a lot of work, management, and time to accomplish this. If you have a need to run high amounts of data space in the cloud or you don't want to be bothered with properly backing up your data, then what Apple is offering can be a good deal. (Except for maybe the Apple premium pricing...but there is value if you're squarely within the Apple ecosystem.)