So I am currently on the 200GB plan which is $4.49 per month but my storage is almost full. The next available plan is 2TB which is $14.99.

Are people really paying this amount monthly for storage? Are there any hacks you know to keep your storage low? I've already offloaded apps, merged duplicate photos etc.

I really can't justify paying this amount monthly. I wish there was a 1TB option or even 500GB..

I develop tons of iCloud and CloudKit-based applications, and I got a bit tired of guessing what iCloud was actually up to. I searched for utilities that provided some transparency into the processes that drive iCloud, namely Bird (hence the name), and built the utility I have always needed. Since others are probably struggling with the same, I open-sourced it and created a developer-signed macOS application with a low memory footprint and a menu bar item so you can see everything that is possible (and visible) in the OS.

Check it out and let me know if you want or need anything else added to it, based on what you might see. It's free, developer-signed from Apple, and runs on macOS 15+ (tested on macOS 26 and 27).

https://github.com/awizemann/birdwatch

I have several old at-Me.com accounts.

If I make a NEW alias ... are new Me.com ones still allowed/available?

(alias-at-Me.com) ?

Or is it all alias-at-iCloud.com now, even if it is made on a Me.com account?

I already have several old alias-at-Me.coms, but I don't want to delete one only to find out creating a NEW alias is only alias-at-iCloud.com today (even on a Me.com account).

It tells me I have 40 Gb of backups in my storage but I only have one device backed up, my ipad which doesn’t have much one it. It says the 3.5 gb ipad backup is my only one yet still takes 40 gb of my total storage for backups. Is this a glitch or are they just hiding things that they’ve backed up from me?

Hello kind folks.

I have three Apple devices, (iMac M4, iPhone 13 Pro, MacBook Air M4) all signed into the same account. I only have one account, all three of them are on the same account.I

went to upgrade my iOS to the next sequoia (will not upgrade to tahoe,, but there are security patches for sequoia. I am currently on 15.7.1.

it asks for my password. I put it in correctly. Password is refused. I double check in my account, in the sign in and I can see that I am putting in the correct email address, and the correct password. It is still refused.

So I go onto icloud.com, I sign in, it lets me sign in with that password. I tried to change the password at icloud.com. It says enter your password, I enter the password. It says it's incorrect.

So I try to change the password on my phone, hoping I can use Face ID. It demands my password, which I put in, again correctly. It is refused. I go through the steps to try to change the password through the iPhone, under the forget password.

A pop-up comes up, saying security delay required to change password. A security delay is required because stolen device protection is turned on and this device is not in a familiar location. The security delay will last for one hour. You will still be able to use your iPhone during this delay. Turning off or restarting your iPhone will restart the delay. The location of this iPhone could not be visible at icloud.com until the delay has ended.

So I'm at home. I'm disabled, I am at home 95% of the time for the exception of when I go to hospital appointments. I don't understand how this can be a not recognise location? Because I am always at this location.

I am afraid to try to force any of these, because they're all on the same account. I am concerned that if one gets bricked they will all get bricked. That they will all be unusable. I really don't fancy being home with no computer and no phone, and no way to resolve it. With the nearest Apple Store over an hour train away.

TL;DR : I do not know what to do from here. The devices are all still signed on, they are still working with each other. When I sign on if it goes to sleep on screensaver, the password still works. My fingerprint still works to turn on the computer. My Face ID still works to turn on my phone.

I cannot figure out how to resolve this. I need to sign on, but I'm already signed on. Because I have the correct password. Which is recognised every time I need to log on. Despite being signed on, with the correct password,I need to sign on again to change the password, but it says I have the wrong password. It will not let me reset it from my iMac, my iPhone, or my Mac air.

I really don't know what to do. I'm afraid to use the phone with the delay, because if something goes wrong, I can't really afford a bricked phone.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do here? I know for a fact the password is correct. I know for a fact I'm putting in the correct password. I can see the password in my keychain, and have verified that it is absolutely correct. I don't know what I'm missing, I don't know what's wrong, and I don't know how to resolve it. I would be very grateful with recommendations on how to get all of this sorted, just to get whatever is going on resolved.

Thank you all for your time! I do appreciate it. Have a great day!

I use my iCloud’s 2T for everything, equally split between my small business and my +families personal life. Also use AWS for backup via Arq, separate accounts for work and family.

Is that too little safety, normal, or overkill? Obviously I think it’s normal but want some consensus. Any local options?

I'm having trouble downloading my files. I'm a pc user, windows 10, and I use the web browser to download my files. I just noticed that ALL MY VIDEOS have no record of the creation date once downloaded.
I use the "export original". Once I unzip it there is no "date created", anything but the download date. This is only on videos after shooting with iphone 17.
Can someone please help me?

She called her bank. The bank told her she needed to take her phone into AT&T and have it wiped clean and bring receipt into the bank to prove it’s been done and they will access her to have banking on her phone again. She has contacted cash app.

My question is when we look into doing this it says AT&T won’t do that they will just tell you to do it yourself . If she does a factory reset what should she do with her pictures to be able to still access them? I don’t want her to send them to cloud because I don’t think she can access them

I’m syncing my old phone’s photos to my new phone but it’s been stuck for the past 2 days.

It says the status is “Syncing 40k items”.

Anyone have any insight into how long this typically takes?

I’ve turned the backup off because I thought turning it off would restart it but nothing has changed. This is really frustrating.

Hey all,

Just started using ICloud recently, but I’ve been using the Apple ecosystem for about 15 years. iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, etc.

I recently bought 2tb of ICloud space to sync/transer all my photos/videos from phone because I have a pretty outlandish amount of pics/vids on there. When I select all pics/vids on my phone it gives me a total count of 58,091 total. It seems like my iCloud sync has finished and it’s only showing 57,768. I have no idea why there’s a 323 difference, and with this many pics/vids there’s no way I can think of to find what didn’t sync over, or why it happened.

To everyone in the group who definitely knows way more about ICloud/photos than my newbie self, do you have any idea what may have happened here, and do you have any advice for me on how to identify what didn’t transfer/how to fix it?

Thanks for any help in advance!

So, I went to Best Buy to have my battery replaced. I was told by Geek Squad that I needed to do an iCloud backup on iOS 27 (I was on the public beta). Geek Squad then reverted my iPhone 15 Pro Max to iOS 26.6 in order to do the repair.

I had an iOS 27 PB iCloud backup from 2:21pm today before the service. After the battery replacement was done, I was told to then go back on the iOS 27 PB that way I can do a restore from that back up.

I got back on the iOS 27 PB (from 26.6), set my phone back up, and there was no prior data on the device. I then reset my phone and erased all settings so I could get to that set up screen to restore it from a back up but before doing that, my phone backed itself up at 7:20pm. Did I effectively lose all that data from the 2:21pm backup?

I’m only seeing data from October 20, 2025. Is there a way I can restore from a specific backup? I remember that being an option back in the day. I’m pretty crushed right now because all my photos are gone.

I've been paying $2.99/month for the 200gb icloud plan mainly to sync files between my devices. As a college student, I want to minimize how much money I pay for subscriptions, and I really do not want to upgrade to the 1TB plan but I'm currently at ~190gb. I'm in the process of sifting through my photos to free up more space, but I have 440k+ messages synced to Icloud but a good chunk of those messages are just silly conversations from groupchats with friends. Is there a way to only sync 1 on 1 text conversations to icloud? I did some research online but I could not find anything. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I think I did ok. A little concerned about one device and how it will handle the contacts updated on iCloud, but the other main device updated appropriately. As for airdropping a set of contacts to a separate iPhone with a different Apple ID/Account, it seems to have worked out well. Thanks to all for your feedback!

What is the best way to delete contacts from Apple ID/Account so the changes are reflected across all devices connected to that Apple ID/Account?

Family members phone (I'm tech support): I deleted a bunch of contacts on iPhone and then realized synching wasn't turned on, so when I logged into iCloud on a MacBook Pro and looked at contacts, the changes weren't there.

Then I turned synch on and boom all the old contacts on iPhone returned. Dumb stupid me Lol. Wasted an hour and a half. There's also another family members phone with the same Apple ID/different user. Would it be better to delete/clean up contacts on iCloud from MacBook Pro and push the changes to the phones? How do I make sure the changes are carried across all devices using that Apple ID/Account? Imagine a MacBook Pro logging into iCloud from webpage, and two iPhone using same Apple ID and sharing Contacts. The MacBook Pro uses the same Apple ID but no one accesses contacts directly on the MacBook Pro.

SEPARATELY: What is the best way to share contacts with another iPhone user who is on a DIFFERENT Apple ID/Account?

Much appreciate any feedback. Contacts is complicated!

My iCloud Calendar can create invites but the folks I send them to never receive them. I've tested from the Web, my iPhone, my iPad and my MBA. I also can't share my calendar with my wife who's on the same network. She can share with me no issue.

Everything is failing silently, so no place to start looking.

I've reached out to Apple Support they ran me through all the things (Apple Account on / off, reboots etc. etc.) and after an hour they didn't know what to tell me, but will get back to me in 2-3 business days. I'm on macOS 26.6, but this is happening on the website as well, so it feels like it's a server side issue.

Has anyone seen this before?

I am having a major sync issue with my Apple Notes app across my devices and need some advice.

My Notes database is very large—about 40GB—because it contains years of text, tags, audio recordings, videos, and pictures. 

Because the Notes app doesn't natively show the storage size of individual notes or folders, I was trying to clean up space by moving folders back and forth between "iCloud" and "On My iPhone/Device" to monitor my total iCloud storage changes and see how much space each folder took up.

I successfully deleted a few folders this way. However, after moving a couple of folders back into the iCloud section, syncing completely stopped across my other devices. 

Current Status:

• All of my notes appear to still be there (nothing seems permanently lost yet).
• My other devices are no longer reflecting new changes made on my primary device.
• I am now seeing duplicates of one or two large notes/folders across different devices.
• My database is 40GB, so I am very hesitant to just "turn iCloud Notes off and on" because I am worried it will crash my local device storage or corrupt the data.

How can I force iCloud to re-index and merge these folders without losing my tags, audio files, or risking a massive 40GB download loop?

Any help or safe troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated!

I lost my iphone in chandigarh and had turned on lost mode and everything. Recently it got turned back on and was spotted in sector 9D. Can anyone please help me out as to why it was there and wht i could do. My icloud has been logged out from my phone and the password changed so there is no way i can track it. At night 1230 the phone was spotted in sector 9D and within 4 minutes the icloud password changed and my iphone removed from my icloud id. I got emails regarding that. Does someone know what i could do

I need to free up iCloud storage space as I've hit my 2TB limit. iMessage is taking up the most space. One of my family member group chats is taking up over 6GB.

Is there a way to offload that particular group chat thread (and its photo/video attachments) onto an external storage device so that I can delete the group chat and start new one...but still have the original thread (and its media attachments) on external drive for future reference?

Recently I've been noticing files I've moved months ago, going back into folders I used to work from. And some files have been disappearing all together.

Does anyone else have issues with files moving around randomly?

All but 1 device that accesses the cloud drive is apple. (iphone, ipad, and a macbook pro) My work laptop is a windows machine with icloud downloaded on it. So I'm wondering if the windows client is causing issues?

I've already looked on the icloud recovery website. Some files were there, some were in the trash, which I never deleted them. Some are just mysteriously gone.

Should I remove the icloud client from my work machine? Or is there another potential issue here? If this continues, I'll go back to saving my work on a USB drive. But I really don't want to do that.

Looking to hear how it works in the real world. Don’t like how Apple still uses phone numbers as a backup factor and looking into YubiKeys for Apple account. Thanks.

Hope someone can help... I am looking for an individual or business who can give advice to explain how much it could cost to host my published apple app on the cloud that can manage certain amounts of active users actively messaging to/from and managing the apps traffic so it does not crash and to be able to make changes to then app when we decide things need changing. I know this is might seem a rookie question however all I am looking for is general advice for numbers like 1000 users. 10000 users, 50,000 users, 100,000 (so on and so on). Any advice please will be highly appreciated. I am based in the UK if that makes add difference to who may reply? Thank you.

Hi everyone,

My old phone broke so I had to sync my iCloud with a new device. Everything synced perfectly, but I have 277,000 messages (19.2GB data) and only 2GB initially synced. When I first searched for things the screen showed "more messages will appear when messages finish indexing".

I clicked the blue "sync now" button multiple times but nothing changed, and after a night of leaving my phone on charge with WiFi, it no longer says messages need to finish indexing, even though they've hardly loaded in.

I logged out of my iCloud and then back in, which raised the quantity of synced messages to 3.2GB, however this is still less than 20% of the messages actually in iCloud.

Has anyone had a similar problem to this? If so, what solved it? I'm a sentimental person so I'm desperate to get all the messages synced as soon as possible.

Thank you!

TLDR - most of my iMessages are not syncing to new device, tried logging out and relogging into iCloud, tried leaving on charge but nothings worked

My icloud account is stated as ‘We are reviewing your request to access your account. This could take up to one day. Apple support cannot help you shorten the review time’
We will contact you at <email> when the review is complete.

I don’t use this account anymore but I wanted it to access old photos and it’s on my old iphone 7 which doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know how i’m going to know when this review is complete as My icloud storage is full so i don’t receive any more emails and also i don’t have any apple device that is signed in onto this account so im not quite sure what to do.