iCloud brings all your Apple devices together in beautiful harmony. Here’s how to make the most of it

Written by Carrie Marshall

Apple’s iCloud comes free with every Apple device from Mac mini to iPhone Pro Max, enabling you to share data between devices and store files and photos in the cloud. It’s a place to put your stuff and share it with others. It’s a way to bring all your Apple devices together. It’s a way to share your Apple products with your family, and it can help you find misplaced iPhones and family members. It’s also pretty small if you don’t pay for an upgrade; you get just 5GB of space for free.

In 2021, Apple offered an upgrade called iCloud+. iCloud+ is free if you subscribe to one of the paid-for Apple One bundles, or you can buy it separately.

iCloud+ gives you more storage and some useful additional features: iCloud Private Relay, which makes it harder for websites to track you; custom email domains, so you can use your iCloud mail with your own domain name such as ‘janesmith.com’; Hide My Email, which generates disposable email addresses for online shopping and other websites; and HomeKit Secure Video, which enables you to store security camera footage in the cloud.

Over the next few pages, we’ll show you everything you need to know about iCloud and iCloud+; how they can make your Apple life easier, whether iCloud+ is worth having and how to protect your account from virtual villains and curious kids alike.

What is iCloud?

Photos

> iCloud Photos is likely to be the feature you use the most – it stores all your images and videos in the cloud, so it doesn’t matter what device you’re using when you want to look at or edit your photos or movies – so the photos we take on our iPhone are editable on our Mac and viewable on our Apple TV and Apple Watch. And because they’re stored in iCloud they don’t need tons of room on your devices.

Files

> Files enables you to access any of the files you store in iCloud Drive and other cloud services from anywhere – so for example we can grab files from our Mac’s Desktop and Documents folder when we’re on our iPhone, or save documents from iPad to Mac. Files knows what things are, so if you open a music file it’ll stream the audio; you can also use Files to delete, duplicate, tag, share and compress files.

Personal data

> If you wish, iCloud can store all kinds of personal data such as your contact details, website and app passwords, debit and credit card numbers, Wi-Fi passwords and more – so for example when you access a new hotspot on your Mac, its details are shared with your iPhone too. Having iCloud remember and recall our strong passwords is a massive time saver that we use every day via Face ID and Touch ID.

Two-factor authentication

> The tried and tested combination of a user name and a password just isn’t secure enough any more, so iCloud enables you to use two-factor authentication (2FA) for more security. Once enabled, when a device or app attempts to log in to your account a message will be sent to your trusted device asking if that’s okay. You can also create different passwords for each individual app that uses your iCloud data.

Family Sharing

> You can share your iCloud subscription with up to five other people, so they can use the same storage for their photos or get apps and media that you’ve purchased from iTunes, the App Store or Apple Books. Everybody’s information is kept separate and secure, so there’s no danger of the kids accessing your financial apps or messing with your work files, and it adds everyone’s devices to Find My.

Privacy

> iCloud isn’t the only cloud storage/syncing service out there, but Apple does Think Different: many such services, especially the free ones, will mine your personal data in order to try and sell you things or sell your data to advertisers, but Apple doesn’t do that. Your iCloud data is encrypted so that third parties can’t access it, and even Apple can’t take a peek at it. Apple takes privacy seriously.

iTunes

> Although iCloud is tightly integrated with the Apple Music service, you don’t need an Apple Music subscription to take advantage of some of iCloud’s more music-friendly features. It can synchronise your iTunes purchases across all of your devices, and if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber it can create a full copy of your entire music library in the cloud and enable you to access it from anywhere.

iOS backups

> iCloud isn’t a backup service – the box on this page tells you why – but it is a useful way of backing up your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Apple Watch automatically. Those backups are particularly handy if you’re resetting one of your devices or upgrading to a newer model; all of its app details, logins and settings are stored in iCloud, so you can restore them or transfer them to your new device.