Mac-ists, what have I missed about iCloud?

Hi

My increasing paranoia about backup currently has 2 external HD’s hidden around the house plus one in my desk at work. (If youve ever had Windows wipe your photo collection you would probably understand)

Now that cloud storage is becoming affordable Im thinking about storing my data with the cloud fairies too.
I have approx 180GB of photos and music, Dropbox is great but not competitive on price so its the icloud thing at a decent sum for 200GB which has taken my fancy.

The thing is being Apple I expected it to be easy to fathom but Im confused.

Looking at the advertising fluff Id expected to be able to easily upload my itunes library and access it on several other devices I own but it looks like I have to pay extra for “Itunes match” in order to do this

Ive also been looking at iphoto to work out how to upload it all there as well and am none the wiser
Again Id thought it would be easy and then I could look at pics on any of the Apple gizmos we own

We have a desktop with master copies of all of our music and photos plus an ipad and some ipods but no iphone, Ive had photostream working well for ages but the killer for me would to be able to look at pics older than 30 days ie all of our photo library on the ipad

So, do I just drag and drop new files like the old days?
Or is there something clever I havent spotted?

Cheers

I would never use iTunes Match, as apart from the cost, it downgrades music to 256Kb/sec, and I rip at 320. I’m happy to have my photos in iCloud, and I’m sure I read that the 1000 photo/30 day limit was being removed, allowing access to the entire photo library to be available on any device at any time, once Yosemite was introduced. I’ve not heard any more about it though, so maybe it’s still to be introduced.
That’s the one thing I really want to use iCloud for, I have 26,000-odd photos on my Mac, so it would be handy to be able to get at older ones any time I want.

I use backblaze for always up-to-date backups of my mac (plus HDDs etc).

iCloud isn’t a backup service, it’s a sync service. E.g. how would you restore all your photos from iCloud once uploaded?

What you want in terms of iCould syncing all your photos is coming, but not till the new version of “photos” for mac which is the replacement for iPhoto (and on iOS too). Some googling will get you more info here.

I backup stuff to Dropbox (1Tb for £60/year).

iCloud seems very over priced, so not used it.

I use Dropbox, as Apple are yet to show me they can do cloud storage properly.

Thanks for the replies

I kind of get icloud being a sync service not a backup but figured it offered a bit more with their ecosystem
It doesnt seem too outrageous to me at least for iphoto to be pointed in the right direction and repopulate itself if the worst ever happened

This has come to a head as I had an 80GB Dropbox account which just expired courtesy of Samsung
1 TB is £96 on their website – how did you get it for 60 please footflaps?

cheers

EDIT: backblaze looks sweet, off for some more research

iCloud really does sound like a nice idea, and it probably will be great in a few years time. Photostream seems a bit of a halfway house, and the way iPhoto manages the library is pretty antiquated. iTunes match is a bit late to the streaming party. I like the syncing of bookmarks and tabs though.

Still use Google Drive (work stuff) and Dropbox (my stuff) for sharing between machines. And use TimeMachine for local backup and Arq[/url] with Amazon S3 for remote backup.

how did you get it for 60 please footflaps?

Pay in one go rather than monthly, it costs me $100/annum = £60ish

I must be on US pricing, but been a user for years. UK pricing looks higher @£7.99/month

You could look at the more niche providers. Spideroak do cloud storage and pitch themselves as more secure than Dropbox.

The best value right now is MicroSoft online office thing, full Office plus unlimited storage (was 1TB) for £6.99/month.

Blimey. Where’s that? Can’t see it on the Office 365 site yet, still says 1TB. Was going to wait till next year when the new Office for Mac comes out.

Really depends on your work stream/flow.

What works for me is (I work across iOS devices and an iMac (home office) and office PC

Drobox (free) for some work/projects
Sugarsync (paid) for ALL work/projects
Time Machine from iMac to ext HDD
Crashplan (paid) from iMac to Cloud

This works for me across devices (sync) and platforms at relatively low cost.

Sugarsync looks rather expensive, why do you choose to use that?

iCloud Photo library only working on Beta version, stores photos from iDevices but you cant upload your own photos yet.

Blimey. Where’s that? Can’t see it on the Office 365 site yet, still says 1TB. Was going to wait till next year when the new Office for Mac comes out.

Just announced yesterday apparently:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7078397/microsoft-unlimited-onedrive-storage-office-365

PC World Cloud is also reasonably priced. Not used it, but was looking around yesterday for similar reasons (want to duplicate my Lacie NAS drive, including time machine back-up, automatically to the cloud each day).

I would never use iTunes Match, as apart from the cost, it downgrades music to 256Kb/sec, and I rip at 320

Why do you downgrade to 320kbs? I ripped all mine at lossless, 11,000-ish kbs 😛

Sugarsync looks rather expensive, why do you choose to use that?

I just find it more fully featured vs Dropbox, in particular I recall Dropbox was entire contents of a folder where Sugarsync enabled a little more control which suited me and the way I work. I think the version control is better also but not sure.

Make sure you understand the difference between Sync and Backup.

(If youve ever had Windows wipe your photo collection you would probably understand)

Generally computers do what you tell them to – that is their biggest flaw.

It is entirely possible to get rid of everything using sync as all copies will sync if you get it wrong.

I Back-up to the physical NAS in my house, I sync to the cloud and the 2 PC’s I have.
If the house gets burgled I loose the local and restore from the cloud.
If the cloud goes I restore from the NAS.
Removing one won’t kill the other.

footflaps – Member
The best value right now is MicroSoft online office thing, full Office plus unlimited storage (was 1TB) for £6.99/month.
POSTED 10 HOURS AGO # REPORT-POST

Might be good value but the upload/download speeds can be painful at times. Considering moving back to Dropbox.

I am in the camp that think the cloud services are too expensive to use as full backup solutions. I continue to backup to external drives with certain key documents stored in a combination of Google Drive and the free iCloud storage.

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/04/office-dropbox/

thats confirmed the move back to dropbox for me…

Ok I guess if you use the office apps.

Still use Google Drive (work stuff) and Dropbox (my stuff) for sharing between machines. And use TimeMachine for local backup and Arq with Amazon S3 for remote backup.

Noticed Arq can now back up to Google Drive. Used Google Apps to manage my domain for a while now and managed to upgrade Google drive to 1TB, comes out at about £6.50 a month now when I was paying about 3.50 anyway. So now ditched S3 and now backing up critical stuff off site to Google Drive using Arq. Seems to be working well so far and decent upload speed too.

I do and they kinda forced you down the onedrive line. shame onedrive is a bit shit though.

I have been using Dropbox for a couple of years to keep my work mac and home macbook Pro synced. It has been fine for documents and files but nor really good for pictures and music as the upload speed is really slow and with photos especially you can easily have a 100 mb with a short video and holiday photos. This takes an age to upload and then sync. However what I now do is switch off the download of the photos folder to my work mac. That way the photos are synced and backed up.

Then the new version of icloud came out and especially iCloud photo library I thought that might be the perfect solution and importantly it doesn’t download the full photo file to each device but just a thumbnail. The problem with iCloud and this is classic Apple is that there is no indicator on a file to show that it has been uploaded or any icon to show that iCloud is syncing. I need to be able to make sure that files have uploaded at the end of the day so that when I turn my work mac off I know I will be able to access the file on my Macbook at home. With iCloud as there is no indicator there is no way in knowing. This is classic Apple where they expect you to just keep all your machines running all of the time.

The other problem I have had with iCloud which to be fair might just need me to set it up better is that with 2 iPads and 2 iPhones at home everything starts syncing and using up the broadband but there is no way to see what a device is doing. Often the only way to be able to use the broadband is to go around switching off all the devices.

In a way it is the classical technology dilemma where phone cameras keep getting bigger and bigger and we all have lots more photos that we want to backup and access everywhere but broadband upload speeds are just not good enough.

So I know use iCloud photo to sync and backup my photos and video but still use drop box to handle all my work files.

The other good thing about drop box is that it keep previous versions, so it does act as a kind of backup. If you deleted a photos folder you can get it back. iCloud I don’t believe does this but it is far far simpler at syncing photos from your iPhone.

as the upload speed is really slow

More likely your internet connection, I’m on 100 Mb/s uncontended symmetric link (at work) and uploading GBs is pretty quick.

Footflaps – Well yes you are correct it is not Dropboxes fault but the slow internet connection. I guess what I mean is that not many people will be on 100MBs broadband and generally upload speeds are way way slower than download. It is a shame no one does a function that reduces the size of the image before the upload so you just keep an emergency backup.

It is a shame no one does a function that reduces the size of the image before the upload so you just keep an emergency backup.

You can do this easily using Picasa, it can batch export to reduced size and the save to your Dropbox folder….

I just upload overnight if it’s a lot of Gb and I’m at home…

Much as I love Apple stuff I do think they are poor at “the Cloud”. They take too long to implement decent cloud-based stuff and other competitors are arguably doing it better. I’m bored of waiting for proper iCloud photo editing and management. For these reasons I wouldn’t want to entrust my backing up to Apple.

What surprises me is why Time Machine does not yet have an option to backup to iCloud. Or does it?

For backup I use Livedrive. Not sure what I pay but it’s £60 ish for the year IIRC. No limit on storage…or at least none that I’ve hit.

Looking at my broadband traffic I have a HUGE amount of uploads going on every month.

Why do you downgrade to 320kbs? I ripped all mine at lossless, 11,000-ish kbs

Nyquists sampling theorem. Then check how acute your hearing actually is for your age.. if you’re capable of over 22Khz you’re doing rather well..