“Once you’ve upgraded your iPhone to iOS 5, you’ll want to set up iCloud, but the default settings will leave you without much storage room to spare,” Jill Duffy reports for PC Magazine.
“If you own an Apple device, you definitely want to take advantage of iCloud. It has several incredible features, including the ability to track down a lost or stolen device (Find My iPhone, Find My Mac),” Duffy reports. “But when I set up iCloud on my iPhone, I found one major catch: I got 5GB of back-up storage space free, and out of the gate, I was already using 4.8GB! How could that be? I don’t have that much stuff on my phone. I poked around my iPhone’s Settings until I figured out how to customize iCloud to better optimize my free allotted storage. After about three minutes, I had gone from using 4.8GB to having 4.8GB remaining. Success!”
Full article with what you need to know to similarly free up space in your iCloud here.
Oh, man, that’s the bee’s knees! That did the trick!
I’ve selected my Mac as the primary backup location. The backup to that is Time Machine off an external hard drive. Backing anything up to iCloud to me is a waste of time as my Mac will have 100x the space allotted to me for free in iCloud. I use iCloud more as a synchronization tool to keep all my Apple devices in sync with each other.
Personally, I could care less about iCloud except that it lets me keep my mac.com email address. I want my MobileMe back.
I agre omal, I find that unless my wife gets her own account we are going to have all sorts of emails, iMessages and pictures being shared when we don’t really want. And with a second account we will have to buy apps twice if we both want them. I wish there was better control on what goes to the cloud.
You don’t need to buy apps twice. Have an itunes account you both share.
Im still wondering why I should make back-ups of my apps to the cloud.
Data, like created in iWorks, I can imagine but the apps you can download easy again from apple app store.
Although I started with a back up to the cloud, that’s the first thing I switched back off.
For a simple restore process.
That really is the cat’s pajamas!
I have an iPod touch 4 and Snow Leopard. As such, I’m totally baffled has to use iCloud. Without Lion, just forget it.
iCloud continues to be a completely worthless, screwed up mess. My ‘iCloud” mailbox sometimes has a few items in it but they vanish nearly instantaneously. NO storage on my local machine. iCloud – it’s pure FUBAR. I’m switching my e-mail to gmail and simply ignoring the cloud. Apple, you might just push me back to Windows with this POS. I’ve already ditched my POSiPhone after they bricked it with an update. How could the company prepare an “update” that is so totally dysfunctional? Was the cause of SJ’s death seeing this mess before release and knowing how badly his company had fallen??
“…you might just push me back to Windows….”
I’d say you are already on windows there little fella.
SIRI suggests that the problem may lie between your ears …
yea due. it’s you. it’s actually a secret club where it works flawlessly for us pretty popular people. sorry man- them’s the breaks.
Check your chair-keyboard interface.
I find iCloud frustratingly opaque to use. It’s f***ed up all right. I created a me.com account specifically for iCloud but it’s unusable as an account. What the f***? Apple, get your act together. It’s a messed up piece of sh*t.
I’m back to manually syncing all my content through a physical cable for the moment until Apple works out all the kinks. It’s not as seamless as Google’s cloud, that’s for sure.
let’s troubleshoot this-
what exactly is your error/issue?
Instantaneous displeasure at the drop of a hat?
Thanks for your offer. I’ll have to read up more on this and figure out where the kinks are. At the moment I can send mail through my me.com account. That works fine. But if I send mail to it, it won’t appear in my inbox. I can’t figure out why. And there appears to be two of everything on my contacts app, one that says iPhone and the other that says iCloud. I presume the iPhone content is synced through the cable and the iCloud content is synced through the cloud. But when I open the notes app and look at that, the iCloud part is blank. So the wired synced was successful but the iCloud sync was only partially successful despite all the right check boxes being ticked.
I’m going to do more research on this. The assumption was that everything should just work – and I’m wary of deleting anything for fear of losing all my data. I thought iCloud was supposed to supplant the physical sync or work in conjunction with it. What appears to be happening is that duplicate entries are being created which isn’t the point of iCloud at all.
“And there appears to be two of everything on my contacts app, one that says iPhone and the other that says iCloud”
I had this problem with Mobile Me syncing and iTunes. In iTunes, on the Info tab, if one has syncing checked with iTunes and also Mobile Me, you’ll get two listings of every contact, address book listing ect. Unchecking “sync with XXXX” eliminates the double entries. I.E. don’t check ANY of the check boxes in the Info pane if you’re using Mobile Me or iCloud and that should eliminate double entries.
Thank you, kind sir, for responding. I think you’ve zeroed in on the problem.
I found on that, on one machine. All I needed to do was in Mail, accounts, delete the old ME account, and recreate the new iCloud account, which it finds automagically from your Apple ID in the first field of the new account.
Until Apple brings back Keychain syncing I won’t be making the switch from MobileMe to iCloud. I’d much rather pay for a system that actually does useful things than something free that doesn’t. Apart from being free, I just don’t see anything compelling about iCloud.