- Download Icloud For Mac
- Getting Started With Icloud For Mac Windows 7
- Getting Started With Cloud Formation
- Getting Started With Icloud For Mac Download
- Getting Started With Icloud For Mac Windows 10
When you create an Apple ID, you will automatically get 5 GB of iCloud storage for free. You can use it for little things like saving your iPhone backups and syncing app data. You can also use it for bigger things, like storing all of your music and photos in the cloud and optimizing your Mac's storage. Your iCloud email address also includes payment and shipping information so that you can buy products from the Apple store, including apps, digital music, movies, books, and Apple devices. It's possible to set up an iCloud account with an email address that doesn't end with @icloud.com, but you may want to create an iCloud email account for. Use Optimize Mac Storage with iCloud Drive to pack videos into a crowded Mac iCloud can automatically manage storage, but you have to get the data onto your Mac or into iCloud first to get the.
Apple iCloud Drive
Editor Rating: Good (3.5)
Pros
- Slick app and web interfaces
- Compatible with Windows as well as macOS and iOS devices
- Account includes 5GB storage when you buy an iOS or macOS device
Cons
- Less straightforward than competing services
- No search in web interface
- No Android app
- Collaborative editing lacks expected capabilities
- Nags to upgrade storage
Bottom Line
Apple's iCloud Drive file-syncing and storage service is worth using, especially if you're committed to Apple's ecosystem, but it doesn't quite measure up to the competition from Google and Microsoft.
Apple's cloud-based file storage and syncing service, iCloud Drive, mostly concerns itself with Apple devices and apps, but you can use it in a web browser and on non-Cupertino-designed computers, too. iCloud Drive is the folder-syncing component of iCloud—Apple's overarching cloud service. Files automatically sync to all devices signed in to your account, including iOS devices, Macs, and Windows PCs, but not Androids. iCloud Drive lets you create folders for your files and provides online storage for Apple's productivity apps, including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. iCloud Drive is Apple-slick when it comes to design, but it's less capable than the competition from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, our PCMag Editors' Choices.
If you use Apple's devices and office productivity apps, iCloud Drive is an attractive choice, because it's tightly integrated with them on all supported platforms. It's so tightly integrated into the Apple ecosystem, in fact, that many people who use it may not realize they are doing so. It also works respectably on Windows computers and the web. However, if you use Android devices or you want a fuller-featured online productivity apps, you might be better off with Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.
Pricing and Plans
If you own an iOS device, Apple iCloud starts you off with 5GB of space, the same as OneDrive offers to all comers. Not only iCloud Drive files, but also other iCloud services count against your iCloud allotment, including photos and backups of your iPhone or iPad. If you don't own an Apple device, you get a paltry 1GB free. Paid accounts start at 99 cents per month, which buys you just 50GB, but for $2.99 you get 200GB, and $9.99 buys a whopping 2TB. Google equals those options with its Google One pricing plans.
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For comparison, Dropbox starts you out with only 2GB of space for free, while Dropbox Pro offers 2TB for $11.99 per month or $99 per year. SugarSync offers less space, with 250GB costing $9.99 per month. Box gives away a generous 10GB of space, but its paid plan for individuals costs $10 per user per month and comes with only 100GB of online storage.
Apple iCloud Drive is more closely comparable to Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive because it is part of a larger platform. Google's storage allotment starts with a free 15GB, but options and pricing plans get tricky because there are so many rules about what counts against your quota. The exceptions are mostly in your favor. Google-created documents, such as Google Docs and Sheets, don't count toward your space limit, though email attachments (including spam) do. Should you need more space in Google Drive, you can get 100GB for $1.99 per month, 200GB for $2.99, or 2TB for $9.99—the same monthly price that iCloud charges.
OneDrive offers 5GB of storage for free. You pay just $6.99 per month for 1TB, and with that, Microsoft throws in an Office 365 subscription to boot. That's an outstanding deal, since it lets you download the full Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications. The Family Plan, at $9.99 per month, gives you five accounts, each with their own 1TB of storage and Office application downloads.
Getting Started With Apple iCloud Drive
The current version of Apple iCloud Drive requires macOS Catalina or later on Mac, iOS 13 or iPadOS on Apple mobile devices, and Windows 10. Apple doesn't offer iCloud Drive apps for Android, so it's less of a cross-platform solution than Google Drive and OneDrive.
Setting up iCloud Drive on a Windows PC is as simple as setting up any other syncing service. You download and install the iCloud control panel program, which creates folders under your main user folder for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos. To start syncing, you create an account or sign in with an existing Apple ID. A system tray icon is also installed, from which you can open the special folders. These use custom icons rather than the standard folder icons. Any files you add to the iCloud Drive folder or its subfolders appear on all your other computers and iOS devices where you have iCloud Drive enabled and signed in to the same account.
On Macs, iCloud works a little differently, and it's less straightforward than more-standard syncing services. There is no app to install, for example, because iCloud Drive is baked into the operating system itself. A new Mac's setup walks you through configuring iCloud; otherwise, to enable it, you must go to System Preferences > iCloud and sign in with an Apple ID, and then select iCloud Drive. Once you've done this, an icon shows up in Finder under Favorites, similar to a folder or connected drive. It can also serve as a backup, if the Desktop & Documents entry is checked in Preferences.
You can drag files into this iCloud Drive, create sub-folders, and manage your local documents. If you use Pages, Numbers, or other Apple apps that leverage iCloud Drive for storage, you see folders for those apps' documents as well. What you don't see is other data that might be counting against your iCloud space, such as iPhone backups.
From the System Preferences section for iCloud, you can see how much storage you're using. Hover over any of the color-coded blocks on a storage progress bar, and you can see what's taking up that space. Within this setting, you can also choose to include or exclude the data associated with various programs installed on your computer, such as TextEdit, Preview, QuickTime Player, and iMovie. Photos are handled separately, under the iCloud umbrella rather than iCloud Drive, although there's nothing stopping you from uploading images to iCloud Drive, and they still eat up the same storage.
As mentioned at the outset, iCloud Drive is the file-syncing subset of iCloud proper. It's this separation between what's in iCloud and what's in iCloud Drive can cause some confusion. Photos, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders get backed up to iCloud, but data from TextEdit, iMovie, and Mail are in iCloud Drive. If most of us had to guess which apps stored their data in iCloud versus iCloud Drive, we'd fail miserably.
Another issue is how quickly the free allotment gets used up, especially if you've set your iPhone and a Mac to sync. It doesn't take long for the system messages to start popping up on phone and computer telling you you're out of storage, so either upgrade or stop uploading backups. Apple makes it hard for an iOS or Mac user to demur from purchasing a storage plan, especially if you're an iPhone user who likes to shoot Live Photos.
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iCloud Drive on the Web
On the web, iCloud Drive is one icon choice in iCloud.com's main menu. This is where you can view, download, and upload files that sync with any Apple devices you have and any other of your iCloud instances—for example, PCs that have the iCloud utility installed or other web browsers open to your iCloud.com account.
But iCloud's web interface pales by comparison with either Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Both of those offer powerful search, drag-and-drop file and folder organization, and right-click context menu options. iCloud Drive offers none of these important conveniences.
The main iCloud web interface shows you icons for Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, Reminders, the iWork apps, Photos, and iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive appears to be separate from those other apps, but all the documents and data you create with those other apps count against your iCloud storage limit.
From the web, you can open your iCloud Drive and see all the files you're syncing, including those that belong to Apple apps such as Keynote. You don't, however, see files in iCloud Drive for your photos, which is annoying, since they're likely to take up the most storage. Microsoft OneDrive lets you see your photos in a folder as well as in Photos view, so you can work with them as you would with any other file type; Google Photos doesn't charge you storage space for pictures under 16 megapixels, but the image files no longer show up in Google Drive since Google separated the two services in 2019.
You can download existing files, upload new files, and create new folders. If you want to create new documents from the web, you can, using the web versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Like Google Drive and OneDrive, iCloud Drive supports drag and drop for adding files from Finder or Windows' File Explorer.
You can't stream music stored to the cloud from this web interface as you can with the other two big platform services, as well as with Dropbox and IDrive. For music playing, you need to either download the files and play them with a local application or play them through the bulky iTunes desktop application, which can access them directly from the cloud.
A final (but big) issue: There's no search functionality in the web iCloud Drive app. Of all the 12 iCloud web apps, only Mail, Contacts, and Reminders have search boxes. Google and Microsoft both offer powerful search options across their online storage and syncing services.
Sharing Files
Google Drive and OneDrive both excel when it comes to sharing files stored in their clouds with friends and coworkers. Those services create download or document-viewing links, which in OneDrive's case can be password-protected or have an expiration date specified. With iCloud Drive, you can share folders, assigning either view-only or editing privileges. Sharing with iCloud always requires an Apple ID, even for viewing—something not needed with Google Drive or OneDrive. Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote productivity apps also offer document sharing and collaboration, which we'll discuss in the next section.
Online Editing
As with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud includes online productivity apps with some collaboration capability. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote function pretty well, but they don't handle collaborative editing as well as the two big competitors do. For example, you can see revisions in an uploaded Microsoft Word document, but you can't edit documents with this revision tracking enabled. And though real-time co-editing is supported, in our testing it wasn't as responsive as other solutions, and it's not as clear who's typing than with Google Drive and OneDrive; you only see an insertion caret for the other users.
iCloud Drive on iOS Devices
Users of the other major syncing services are likely to find iCloud Drive on iOS devices an unfamiliar experience. On iPhones and iPads, Apple's cloud service is more like an invisible layer that only becomes visible to apps that have access to its repository. You can, however, see iCloud Drive in app form in the Files app introduced in iOS 11. From this app, you can preview standard document file types and send them to other apps that can open them. You can also play audio files (unlike in the web iCloud client) and view images.
We're happy to see that iCloud Drive on iOS can finally act as a download target for iOS browsers. This is enabled by the Files app, and it means that you can save any file type you find on the web, say, an .EXE file downloaded from Download.com, to iCloud when you choose Save to Files and then iCloud on an iPhone or iPad. This is a long-awaited feature, giving you the ability to share or transfer any type of file from yoru Apple mobile device.
One gaping difference from most cloud services is that Cloud doesn't offer any of the cross-web integrations that Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive do. Dropbox and Google Drive in particular are strong in this area, integrating with nearly all of the popular web applications you can think of.
A Nonconformist
The original purpose of iCloud and iCloud Drive was to give Apple users a seamless experience for their Apple apps across all Apple devices, without having to even think about where the files live. In many ways, Apple has succeeded in that mission. The company has made strides in extending the service beyond that narrow brief, but iCloud Drive remains less straightforward and includes fewer conveniences than other file-syncing services. For most cloud storage, syncing, and online productivity collaboration scenarios, either Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, both PCMag Editors' Choices, serve you better.
Apple iCloud Drive Specs
Download Icloud For Mac
Emphasis | Apple Device Users |
File Size Limit | 15GB |
Free Storage | 5 GB |
Online Editing | Yes |
File Versioning | Yes |
Windows App | Yes |
iOS App | Yes |
Android App | No |
Best File Sync & Backup Picks
Further Reading
Provide a fast, secure, and privacy-friendly way for users to set up an account and start using your apps and websites.
Planning
Sign in with Apple allows you to set up a user account in your system, complete with name, verified email address, and unique stable identifiers that allow the user to sign in to your app with their Apple ID. It works on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. You can also add Sign in with Apple to your website or versions of your app running on other platforms. Once a user sets up their account, they can sign in anywhere you deploy your app.
Examples of Use Cases
With Sign in with Apple, it’s easy to:
- Allow users to create an account early in your app experience if your app has limited functionality without an account.
- Allow users to create an account after interacting with features of your app. For example, to save progress or set up a profile.
- Allow users to create an account after completing a purchase as a guest.
- Allow users with existing accounts to sign in or reauthenticate to any version of your app or website.
Guidelines
Apps that use a third-party or social login service to set up or authenticate the user’s primary account with the app must also offer Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option. As you plan and design your app or website for Sign in with Apple, make sure to follow these guidelines. In addition, the Human Interface Guidelines include downloadable left-aligned, center-aligned, and logo-only buttons. App updates must follow these guidelines starting June 30, 2020.
Implementing
Service ID and Key Configuration
You’ll need to use Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles to set up identifiers and keys in your Apple Developer account before you can implement Sign in with Apple. Organizations can register up to 100 website URLs for each Service ID enabled for Sign in with Apple. Individuals can register up to 10.
Email Relay Service
Apple’s private email relay service is used by privacy-conscious users that keep their personal email address private when setting up an account. In order to send email messages through the relay service to these users, you will need to register your outbound email domains, subdomains, or email addresses. The registration process provides informational Sender Policy Framework record checks and does not require website server file verification. Organizations can register up to 100 outbound email sources. Individuals can register up to 32.
If we detect that emails sent from your account were unable to be delivered by Apple’s private email relay service, we’ll send periodic email notifications to Account Holders and admins. Account Holders and admins can turn off these email notifications in the More section of Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles.
Apps
Rival crock pot sizes. Use the AuthenticationServices framework to let users set up accounts and sign in to your native iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS apps.
Unity Tools
Easily integrate Sign in with Apple into games and apps built with Unity using a new Unity Asset Store package.
Web and Other Platforms
Use Sign in with Apple JS to let users set up accounts and sign in to your website and apps on other platforms.
Service API
Use the Sign in with Apple API to validate the authorization code provided to your app and check a user’s status directly with Apple servers.
Testing and Verifying
Getting Started With Icloud For Mac Windows 7
Xcode 11
Getting Started With Cloud Formation
To test your apps, use the latest of Xcode 11 and update your devices to the latest versions of iOS 13, iPadOS, macOS Catalina,tvOS 13. To test your website, you’ll need to group it with an app that is enabled for Sign in with Apple and is available on the App Store.
Getting Started With Icloud For Mac Download
Resources
Getting Started With Icloud For Mac Windows 10
Find tools, documentation, and resources you need to implement Sign in with Apple.