Okay, Sarah, this came in for you.
Thanks. No problem. Yeah, this happens.
Can I see your iCloud storage in settings? Sure. So do you want to pay for more storage so that you can save your iCloud photos?
Not if I don't have to. I already have enough subscriptions, so. All right, well, it looks like I have my work cut out for me.
Good luck. Thanks. This is a DVD.
It's late 90s technology that holds about two hours of glorious standard definition
video or about 4.7 gigabytes. Now, as of today, Apple's free tier of iCloud gives you more, but not by much because it's
only five gigabytes. So if you were to put this movie into your iCloud, you'd get the notification.
When iCloud came out a week after Steve Jobs passing, the space was mostly intended for
iOS device backups or email if you signed up for an iCloud email account.
So five gigabytes was plenty. But now we've got iCloud photos, iCloud drive, messages in iCloud and a host of other apps
all vying for your storage space, which Apple does a great job of managing seamlessly and
transparently, at least until you run out of space at the free tier, which won't take
long on a modern device. And when you do, they're all too happy to tell you about it and charge you anywhere
between a dollar a month for 50 gigabytes to $10 a month for two terabytes.
If you don't pay, you might end up like Fatima from our previous video, which you should
watch if you've missed who didn't have a backup when her iPhone fell into a lake.
One obvious way to stop this notification madness is to stop using iCloud.
You can't disable it outright. But if you go into settings and then click on your iCloud account name, you can easily
identify what's taking up all the space and then select what you do or don't want to
sync. Now, certain features don't count towards your five Gigabyte piton, so there's no
real reason to turn them off. As for the rest, well, you need to make some tough decisions.
Personally, I love iMessage and I don't ever delete messages.
So my five Gigabyte allotment will be used to synchronize messages between all my devices.
You might like your iCloud email and decide that's what you want using that space.
I don't know what Sarah wants to use the space with.
OK, so what do you actually want to save on your iCloud?
What about my photos? Can't do that.
You could save your messages, though. No, I don't need to do that.
Backups? Oh, sure. All right, sounds good.
All right, now, I think we probably should deal with what's taking up all this iCloud.
For Sarah, it's photos. It's always photos.
Back in 2013, it was the camera roll ballooning iCloud backups.
Now it's iCloud photos. And if you've turned on messages in iCloud, well, it's not the text.
There's probably a bunch of photos and gifs in there taking up space, too.
So if you don't want to pay Apple, you're going to have to save your photos elsewhere.
And that's not that straightforward. When you set up a new iPhone or Apple ID, iCloud photos is turned on by default, whether
you like it or not. If you want to pay for iCloud storage, it's not a terrible service, allowing all the photos
you take to be easily synced and available on all your devices.
But most people don't know it's turned on, and they could easily fill it up with one
birthday party. So if you don't want to fill your free iCloud storage, you'll have to turn it off.
And then make sure you turn it off when you set up your new phone forever more.
Now I'm sure you still want to save your important photos from your phone.
And before June of this year, the easy answer was Google Photos.
It gave unlimited storage of your iPhone photos and video for free.
But that's over now. So you have to consider a few other options.
The first is a lightning DPD drive. Now yes, it's less than 5 gigabytes, but you can always grab more by simply adding
Obviously, I'm just kidding, though, there is an app in the app store called Nero Airburn.
A good option might in fact be Amazon Prime Photos, which offers unlimited storage for
photo uploads, but not for video. You only get 5 gigabytes for those.
Another option, and shh, don't tell anyone, is that you might already have cloud storage
with work or school. So if they use Google, you can use Google Photos the way you used to.
Or if your organization uses Office 365, OneDrive supports automatic photo uploading deep in the app, too.
Just understand that it's not a forever guarantee because, god forbid, you lose your job or finish school or something.
And it might be against policy or something, but shh, it can be our little secret.
Another convenient alternative is iCloud Photostream.
It is a service that predates iCloud Photos. Basically, it stores photos from the last month in the cloud and downloads the last
thousand of them to your other devices and permanently saving them into your computer.
The catch is that you might not be able to use it since it's no longer available with
newer accounts. Sarah and I do have it available, but my sister doesn't, so your mileage may vary.
And if you don't have it, then you're going to have to manually plug in your phone into
your computer and use the image capture app or the photos app on both your Mac and Windows
if you have a PC. Now if you don't have a computer at all, I do have one last solution.
It's one of these little flash drives with a lightning plug.
This one is the SanDisk iXpand Flash Drive Go, and it cost me $40 for 128GB of storage.
That's the same as 13 months of 200GB of iCloud storage, but this I can keep forever.
It uses an included app that pops up, prompting you to backup your photos when you plug it
in. But I would describe the interface as mediocre at best, and it has one of the most dangerous
pop-ups I've ever seen once it's done.
Do not delete. So be very careful which button you press.
Ultimately though, it does the job as a convenient way to backup photos from your iPhone without
relying on the cloud. And if you need to, flip it over and it'll plug into any old USB port to transfer the
files to another device.
Okay so then how do you want to backup your photos if you can't backup them up on iCloud
Photo? Well I already downloaded them onto my laptop. Really?
Yeah. Great. Now before we delete the photos off iCloud, we need to back them up to the iPhone.
Sarah has a lot of space on her phone so she can fit the photos already uploaded to
iCloud. Since it won't be over 5GB, you probably will be fine too.
But if not, you can download the photos onto your computer and the photos app.
You'll have to turn off iCloud photos on all of your devices anyway.
So in settings, go into iCloud, go to iCloud Photos and then select Download and Keep Originals.
Once those have been downloaded and you've copied them to your photo storage of choice,
you can click on the extremely scary Disable and Delete setting.
Now don't worry, it only deletes the copies stored in iCloud.
While your photos stored in iCloud are not downloaded onto this iPhone, these photos
will be permanently deleted from iCloud in 30 days to avoid losing them. Download and keep originals before continuing.
But I did that.
Why is it saying this?
We have to see what's on your iCloud. So if you want to just- How are we going to do that?
Just go to iCloud.com and log in with your Apple ID. Okay, so you can click on Photos.
Wow, I didn't even know this existed, to be completely honest with you, and I've been
using Apple products for my entire life. Congratulations.
Okay, Photos.
It's blank. There's nothing there.
Some of the photos- Who cares? Click on Hidden?
Yeah, I guess who it is, who cares? Because they're like in my photos on my laptop anyways.
I don't understand. So you're comfortable clicking Continue anyway?
Yeah. To delete that everything off your iCloud? Is that it?
Yeah. Undo it if you can't find a photo.
Nice. Now we'll want to turn on backups, which on Sarah's phone they are actually already
on. She just hasn't been backing up because there's no space.
Okay, so I realize that a backup without Photos might not seem useful, but it saves
other things too, like settings, messages, Wi-Fi passwords, home screen icon layouts,
and anything saved within apps. It's that last one though that can end up causing some problems.
Thankfully, there is an easy way to trim your backup down to size.
When you go into Settings and you go to your iCloud, you can click on Manage Storage and
then click on Backups. There, you can delete crusty old backups from long gone phones or manage more precisely
what's getting backed up, even down to individual apps.
Let me show you on my phone, for example.
Take the Burger King app. It requires a king size 117 megabytes of backup space.
For what? Flick the switch off, click turn off and delete, and I've saved myself a whopper.
Now you can scroll through here and if there are any apps where you don't care if what
you did in that app gets saved, you can switch it off and move on.
McDonald's requires 89 megabytes and then Teams on my phone wanted over 500 megabytes.
If leaving out any of this critical data gives you anxiety, there is one other alternative.
Remember iTunes Backup? Well, it still exists, but now it's found in the Finder window on your Mac.
In the Device Sync Management page, merely select Backup to your computer and it'll
do the rest, as long as you have enough storage on your computer.
I recommend you encrypt the backup, since that allows you to include all personal information
like health data. Just make sure you save the password somewhere.
This method can also be used on a PC, but it still requires the iTunes Windows app.
If your computer stays mostly on, you can click the Sync with Wi-Fi button, which means
your phone will backup when it's charging and on the same network as your computer.
And you can always manually trigger a backup if you need to by clicking the Backup Now
button. It's important to remember that if you are backing your phone up to your computer, you
should also be backing up said computer too. Obviously, Time Machine is an excellent way to handle this on a Mac, and there are a plethora
of supported drives ranging in price from very affordable USB external jobs to exotic
and complicated network-attached storage. Alright, since this is done, let's bring it back to Sarah.
Sarah? You're back.
I have good news. I have whittled it down to 3.3 gigabytes.
What over? You are now within your 5 Gigabyte allotment.
Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. How does it feel?
It feels amazing. Great. Yes.
Apple's 5 gigabytes of iCloud storage is a morsel.
It's really a free trial of Apple's iCloud service and nothing more.
You can get it to work, but it requires sacrificing a simple and integrated way to backup photos.
And I think it's frankly shocking that there's no automatic way of offloading your photos
onto your computer through Wi-Fi, especially considering that iCloud Photo Stream appears
to be fading to black. But as long as you understand how iCloud works, it is possible to keep those notifications
at bay without spending a penny and still have safe storage of your precious memories.
Thanks for uploading to this Mac Address. Make sure to subscribe.
And if you're someone who still isn't paying for iCloud storage, give us a like.
I'm curious if anyone else has been able to manage their iCloud storage like I have.