Has Anyone Here Moved COMPLETELY to iCloud? As in EVERYTHING.

[HappyDude20]

Hi everyone, so I'm asking here if anyone has decided to move everything into iCloud or Apple services.

This question came about finding all of my 70GB+ worth of photographs from Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Google Drive, Gmail, PhotoBucket and more that have accumulated throughout the years. Reason I began searching for all my photos is because they've been spread out for too long (on external hard drives too that can fail since they're old) and I hardly have time to access the ones I specifically want.

Well, I did it and retrieved all of my photos from all these web services and also from my external hard drives and am considering moving all of these pictures to iCloud Drive where I can now finally access them on all of my iOS devices and MBP.

The Apple ecosystem doesn't seem all too bad and honestly I fear that the the NSA has as easy access to my photos on DropBox as they will with Apple's iCloud; but since i'm not doing anything illegal or something that would be frowned upon, i'm considering going the iCloud Drive route.

With that being said, I'm wondering if others have gone a step forward and perhaps have deleted their Gmail account to go with Apple's email services, among the others Apple provides. Any guidance or thoughts i've may not have yet come across in the matter is appreciated.

 

[bgro]

I use iCloud for email (have my gmail forwarded to my iCloud account), contacts, calendars, reminders notes etc etc. I use google Drive for my documents tho as iCloud drove absolutely sucks imo

 

[mgdominguez]

I use iCloud pretty much for everything. Mail, Calendar and the like work ok across my devices (a laptop, iPhone and iPad). I also have iTunes Match. It's working better now that when it was originally released.

I just started using iCloud Photo Library, and it's not going as smooth as I would like. Discarding the fact that I'm on a crappy DSL with a laughably low upload speed, I've noticed a few glitches during the upload process. It stalled once, forcing me to turn it off and on, only to get a weird error that forced me to start over. At first I thought it was starting over, but it seems that it detects that it has previously uploaded a photo and just recover it from the ether or somewhere else. I'm halfway now, and I have a much smaller library than you do.

I also noticed something odd with the iCloud Photo Library on my iPad. I have "Optimize storage space" option enabled, so whenever I see a photo, it downloads a tweaked version for that photo based on the device. With the iPad, the photo seems to be marked as a new one, so if I connect it to my MacBook, Photos show them as available to import, which is completely wrong. I do not see this behavior with my iPhone. I've already tried turning off the feature on my iPad to no avail.

Anyway, it looks like a typical 1.0 release from Apple. Considering the size of your photo collection, I would wait a while before committing to it, or even doing a trial run. YMMV.

 

[HappyDude20]

I use iCloud for email (have my gmail forwarded to my iCloud account), contacts, calendars, reminders notes etc etc. I use google Drive for my documents tho as iCloud drove absolutely sucks imo

I have to ask, why does iCloud Drive suck in your opinion? I just wanna get an overall consensus before I decide to migrate all of my files somewhere for the long term.

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I use iCloud pretty much for everything. Mail, Calendar and the like work ok across my devices (a laptop, iPhone and iPad). I also have iTunes Match. It's working better now that when it was originally released.

I just started using iCloud Photo Library, and it's not going as smooth as I would like. Discarding the fact that I'm on a crappy DSL with a laughably low upload speed, I've noticed a few glitches during the upload process. It stalled once, forcing me to turn it off and on, only to get a weird error that forced me to start over. At first I thought it was starting over, but it seems that it detects that it has previously uploaded a photo and just recover it from the ether or somewhere else. I'm halfway now, and I have a much smaller library than you do.

I also noticed something odd with the iCloud Photo Library on my iPad. I have "Optimize storage space" option enabled, so whenever I see a photo, it downloads a tweaked version for that photo based on the device. With the iPad, the photo seems to be marked as a new one, so if I connect it to my MacBook, Photos show them as available to import, which is completely wrong. I do not see this behavior with my iPhone. I've already tried turning off the feature on my iPad to no avail.

Anyway, it looks like a typical 1.0 release from Apple. Considering the size of your photo collection, I would wait a while before committing to it, or even doing a trial run. YMMV.

Wow what a unique, unexpected issue. Thank you for bringing that to light. For years I've used Dropbox but there's only so far a free 8Gb account will take me. For years I've only owned an iPad and iPhone and ease of access to my files is the main concern... Especially photos. But admittedly my photos don't need to come directly from the iCloud photos feature. In fact, I'd be much more content having all my photos in archived dated folder and I cherry pick whichever photos I want at whatever time. I say this with a bit of angst only because I had to manually retrieve every individual iPhoto album from different iPhoto and OS X versions that we're Time Machine'd on my external drive. I'm doing all this so as to never deal with iPhoto again because every iPhoto version seems to be incompatible with the next version, not to mention how slow retrieving photos get when I open up an old MacBook Pro I have stored in a closet back on the other side of the country for emergencies. Going the cloud route to access my files is my main goal, to break away from having to ask friends and family to snail mail me my ancient external hard drive... That is old and can break down at any moment.

 

[bgro]

I have to ask, why does iCloud Drive suck in your opinion? I just wanna get an overall consensus before I decide to migrate all of my files somewhere for the long term.

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Wow what a unique, unexpected issue. Thank you for bringing that to light. For years I've used Dropbox but there's only so far a free 8Gb account will take me. For years I've only owned an iPad and iPhone and ease of access to my files is the main concern... Especially photos. But admittedly my photos don't need to come directly from the iCloud photos feature. In fact, I'd be much more content having all my photos in archived dated folder and I cherry pick whichever photos I want at whatever time. I say this with a bit of angst only because I had to manually retrieve every individual iPhoto album from different iPhoto and OS X versions that we're Time Machine'd on my external drive. I'm doing all this so as to never deal with iPhoto again because every iPhoto version seems to be incompatible with the next version, not to mention how slow retrieving photos get when I open up an old MacBook Pro I have stored in a closet back on the other side of the country for emergencies. Going the cloud route to access my files is my main goal, to break away from having to ask friends and family to snail mail me my ancient external hard drive... That is old and can break down at any moment.

I've had syncing issues with iCloud drive, lost Numbers files, and just generally don't trust it. But mainly I think it sucks because i want complete control over my Drive, and have it be folder based not app based. Similar to how Google Drive (which i think is excellent) does it. So for now I'll be using Google Drive. Just switched my email back over to Gmail as well as some of my forwarded mail was not appearing in iCloud. Not the first time this has happened. Apple is just terrible with cloud services imo (with the exception of iCloud device backup)

 

[HappyDude20]

I've had syncing issues with iCloud drive, lost Numbers files, and just generally don't trust it. But mainly I think it sucks because i want complete control over my Drive, and have it be folder based not app based. Similar to how Google Drive (which i think is excellent) does it. So for now I'll be using Google Drive. Just switched my email back over to Gmail as well as some of my forwarded mail was not appearing in iCloud. Not the first time this has happened. Apple is just terrible with cloud services imo (with the exception of iCloud device backup)

Damn that sucks, you're not the first that has mentioned apple these issues here on MR. Sucks cause apple has the potential of convincing me to move all of my stuff over to them.

I too want complete control which is why I feel Dropbox keeps it simple when it comes to folders but I feel Dropbox is rather expensive. And here I felt iCloud Drive would be the most elegant solution, at least that's how it's portrayed by Apple.

 

[impaler]

Yes. I'm totally bought in to a completely integrated experience. I pay the $3.99/month for 200GB of space, and use it truly for everything. Email, contacts, calendars, photo library, reminders, documents, Safari sync, notes, keychain, back to my mac...then iTunes Match for my 25,000 song collection.

 

[bgro]

Damn that sucks, you're not the first that has mentioned apple these issues here on MR. Sucks cause apple has the potential of convincing me to move all of my stuff over to them.

I too want complete control which is why I feel Dropbox keeps it simple when it comes to folders but I feel Dropbox is rather expensive. And here I felt iCloud Drive would be the most elegant solution, at least that's how it's portrayed by Apple.

If you think Dropbox is expensive then just make sure u realize that iCloud Drive is double the price ($20 for 1TB). Although with iCloud drove u have the option of purchasing less storage. But yeah, I'm actually slowly moving away from Apple cloud services as I just don't trust them from a reliability standpoint.

 

[ardchoille50]

Yes. I'm totally bought in to a completely integrated experience. I pay the $3.99/month for 200GB of space, and use it truly for everything.

I chose the same space tier and have moved everything to iCloud.. happy as a clam.

 

[zOne31]

I recently transitioned from using Gmail (contacts, email forwarding to iCloud, calendar, moving from Chrome to Safari) to iCloud as well. I use iCloud for everything except Notes and for that I use Evernote. I'm currently at 2.5 GB out of 5 GB on my iCloud account with the majority being downloaded emails and photos. I don't really use iCloud drive that much but may transition towards that in the future.

Basically, I switched to iCloud because of photos. From there, I thought to myself, why not just transition everything else along with it. The transition between my computer and iPhone are seamless and that's something that I think the photos app has really brought on and accomplished. As an alternative backup, I created a Flickr account (mind as well since I have a Y! account for Fantasy Football) to upload downloaded photos onto my Mac as an alternative storage option. Prior to this, I tested Dropbox, G+ (I recently deleted this account as I transitioned from Google to iCloud), OneDrive, and other free storage options. As an Amazon Prime member, I have also looked into their photo storage and would consider that as an alternative in the future.

The only thing I don't really use right now is Apple Maps. I would like to use it more often since I find the Mac app to be fine. But I just don't find that it compares to Google.

As for pricing, I hope that Apple increases their base storage option. Still, their $0.99 for 20 GB per month plan isn't too bad and something I don't mind paying. But at this point, I'm not too worried about going over 5 GB, unless I somehow take a bunch of photos in my future travels to reach that limit.

For me, the next step would be to delete my GMail account. I just have so much logins associated with that and I haven't really wanted to put in the time to switch everything to iCloud just yet. Maybe someday when I don't feel so lazy. Haha.

 

[impaler]

I recently transitioned from using Gmail (contacts, email forwarding to iCloud, calendar, moving from Chrome to Safari) to iCloud as well. I use iCloud for everything except Notes and for that I use Evernote. I'm currently at 2.5 GB out of 5 GB on my iCloud account with the majority being downloaded emails and photos. I don't really use iCloud drive that much but may transition towards that in the future.

I think the iCloud photo library is great. I have over 20GB of photos uploaded in there, and it's pretty flawless. I took the pain to update my photo library with dates, location info (when known), etc., mainly for photos taken before I used my iPhone for everything (which captures location data automatically now). While painful to spend the time to do, I'm much happier now - because it was always a disorganized mess with iPhoto. The Photos app on Yosemite is great - and the syncs are reliable.

 

[zOne31]

I think the iCloud photo library is great. I have over 20GB of photos uploaded in there, and it's pretty flawless. I took the pain to update my photo library with dates, location info (when known), etc., mainly for photos taken before I used my iPhone for everything (which captures location data automatically now). While painful to spend the time to do, I'm much happier now - because it was always a disorganized mess with iPhoto. The Photos app on Yosemite is great - and the syncs are reliable.

Yeah. I agree. I only use my iPhone for photos so I love that ability to sync back to my Mac. I can understand the frustrations of those who have used Aperture and iPhotos in the past and that transition towards the new Photos app.

I was looking at my photos and noticed that location geo-tagging only appeared for more of my recent photos (perhaps since I moved to iCloud Photo Library). How do I add location info to my other photos without that information?

 

[GIZBUG]

What steps did you take from moving from google to icloud?
Currently I exported my calendar from google to icloud.

What I still need to do is, the mail and my contacts. I just restored a fresh install of 8.3 on my phone. I plan to export my google contacts today to icloud, then work on the mail. I am pretty sure how to get the contacts over, but what about the mail?

Also, waht is the easiest way to access my mail from a PC from here on out, if I move to icloud? Before, i would just go to gmail.com

 

[impaler]

What steps did you take from moving from google to icloud?

What I still need to do is, the mail and my contacts.

Also, waht is the easiest way to access my mail from a PC from here on out, if I move to icloud? Before, i would just go to gmail.com

One way to get the mail piece done is to first, go into Gmail, and set up forwarding to iCloud. That'll take care of new emails. Second, if you really want to move your Gmail account emails to iCloud, if you use a client like Mail on OS X, or Thunderbird, whatever - just pick folders and drag to iCloud. Will take a while to move it all over.

 

[HappyDude20]

Will I be able to access all of my files if I drop say a 100GB folder titled "My Life" in iCloud Drive?

I've included pictures to explain easily.

I have this My Life folder, which contains docs, pics, etc. The folder within that are highlighted green are of more importance. For example, the Photos folder contains about 50+ folders, each contains a bunch of pictures from different events and dates.

I would love to drag this entire My Life folder onto my iCloud Drive on my Mac and then be able to access all of these files from my iPhone or iPad. Or would I be restricted on my iOS apps to only certain files?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

You'd be better off going "all in" with Microsoft's solution. It's cheap (or free even) and loads better than iCloud. I get frustrated with Apple every time I have to deal with iCloud for my partner.

 

[aixporter]

Will I be able to access all of my files if I drop say a 100GB folder titled "My Life" in iCloud Drive?

I've included pictures to explain easily.

I have this My Life folder, which contains docs, pics, etc. The folder within that are highlighted green are of more importance. For example, the Photos folder contains about 50+ folders, each contains a bunch of pictures from different events and dates.

I would love to drag this entire My Life folder onto my iCloud Drive on my Mac and then be able to access all of these files from my iPhone or iPad. Or would I be restricted on my iOS apps to only certain files?

Yes, you will have access to this folder on all of your macs and idevices. BUT, quote me if I'm wrong, the folder WILL take up hard drive space on all of your macs. That is, iCloud Drive is not a streaming solution like Dropbox.

 

[HappyDude20]

Yes, you will have access to this folder on all of your macs and idevices. BUT, quote me if I'm wrong, the folder WILL take up hard drive space on all of your macs. That is, iCloud Drive is not a streaming solution like Dropbox.

I dragged this 'My Life' folder to iCloud drive on my Yosemite OS X MBP, but I don't see it uploading anything. It's just sitting there in the iCloudDrive folder and all the files inside each folder have dotted clouds.

My goal here is to upload everything to iCloud Drive so I can then access all of these files on my iPhone & iPad devices, which are essentially the only 2 devices I always have with me. Even this MBP that i'm currently wanting to upload 'My life' folder to iCloud Drive is only used about once a year by me whenever I touch down to home base in L.A.

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Another question, so currently I'm not sure if this my life folder is actually uploading to the iCloud drive... those dotted clouds still appear everywhere within.

Secondly, say after I get this 'my life' folder uploaded to iCloud drive, how would i view it on my iOS devices? Obviously the dedicated iWork folders will have the documents that'll work in the native apps but what about accessing this 'my life' folder from iOS devices?

I'm currently stuck on these two issues. Maybe I should upload one folder at a time as oppose to just dumping the 100GB+ My Life folder in there?

 

[HappyDude20]

UPDATE: I found out I could access my overall folders and files from iCloud Drive on iOS devices with an app called Cloud Opener, among others..

But uploading actually files has not worked at all; only on the Safari web browser using drag and drop (slow process, individual folder uploads).

 

[roadbloc]

I'm going to put it how it is, iCloud is complete garbage. Slow and unreliable at best. Just like MobileMe was except at least it's free this time. My condolences to anybody solely relying on iCloud since there are many more cloud services out there that are a hell of a lot more reliable and compatible with more devices.

 

[HappyDude20]

I'm going to put it how it is, iCloud is complete garbage. Slow and unreliable at best. Just like MobileMe was except at least it's free this time. My condolences to anybody solely relying on iCloud since there are many more cloud services out there that are a hell of a lot more reliable and compatible with more devices.

Thats funny. Since my last post I gave up trying to upload everything to both the iCloud Drive folder and the site version.

 

[bubbleboil]

Just a note, photos uploaded with 2mp resolution do not count towards your storage space in Google drive.

So only certain photo I will back with full resolution. The rest just 2mp. This saved a lot of space since photo took up my majority of space in Dropbox.

 

[steve9856]

I am also all in with Apples ecosystem including i Tunes match.
I must be blessed never ever had any trouble at all, It just works.

Just remember opinions are like *******s everyone has one...

 

[d21mike]

I am all in with iCloud. No system will be perfect for everyone. Even if you could bring together a lot of different solutions to have a better solution you would then not be happy with managing all of the solutions. Like most I would like a few changes but overall I am very happy with iCloud. I strongly recommend you do your own testing. Very easy to do and you can learn all of the features and determine if it is best for you. My needs or others may not match your needs.

 

[reese2147]

Just remember that iCloud drive is a SYNCING service.... it is NOT "storage". All iCloud drive does is syncs data between devices.

Its total garbage.