That's an email I received from Apple over the weekend. Shoot. I had no idea that iCloud would have limits when I first heard the benefits of using it. I mean Apple really touts using iCloud as storage for your devices to save space on the devices. The instructions are difficult for me to understand. Well, one of them is, the other is to send money to Apple to buy more space, that I understand.
The second way to free up more space is to delete the backups on the devices, we have 4 devices. The biggest issue for me is what this means. By deleting backups do you lose everything? If you delete the backup on one, will it delete on all?
I'm guessing the biggest memory hog on my iphone and ipads are photos so I figured I'd download all of them to my computer. A friend of mine who works for Apple came over last night and we did just that, put all photos onto my desktop computer. Now I guess it's time to get up the nerve to delete them from the phone and ipads. Neither of us really knows if that will help the iCloud storage space.
Then do I turn off Photo Stream? I don't know.
If all this sounds like jibberish, it is.
This is what I found on Apple's Support page: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486
You can delete photos from your Photo Stream the same way you delete other photos from your device. Just select the photo you want to remove and tap or click Delete. When you delete a photo from Photo Stream on one device, iCloud will automatically delete it from the Photo Stream album or view on your other devices.
My personal observation is that at the rate you take pictures reaching the limit on any storage site (cloud based or otherwise) will quickly be reached. The basic limits of these storage sites is not all that large especially for those who make great use of them. Have fun taking pictures and then deciding what to do with them!
Posted by: Bob Herring | August 06, 2012 at 09:14 AM
Thanks Bob, good thing I put them all on the computer.
Posted by: Diane Meyer | August 06, 2012 at 09:20 AM
Do you then save them to a CD or some other type of storage device? I had the issue when the computer died and they weren't able to extract the photos. Fortunately the ones I lost were not critical.
Posted by: Pam | August 06, 2012 at 12:03 PM
Pam, I have an external hard drive which just plugs into a usb port on the computer. I copy most photos and some other things I don't want to lose into that. If one or the other crashes, I still have the other.
Posted by: Diane Meyer | August 06, 2012 at 12:34 PM
I use the cloud and an airport drive. Have some photos and docs on a couple of external drives, but love the automatic setup features of the airport. Between Pam and me we have 2 iPhones, 2 iPads, 2MacBook Pros and the iMac I'm on now. The airport backs up changes to all of the files in a very clean and automatic way.
It is also a better wifi router than the one from ATT
Posted by: Brad | August 07, 2012 at 08:03 PM