Has anyone here downgraded from iCloud+ (2TB) to the regular iCloud plan of 200GB?
My family only ever uses ~250GB—that’s been the rough amount over a year now. I explored other ways to use iCloud, but it doesn’t look like there’s any real way to put the rest of that storage to work, which is $10 a month (as opposed to $3) a month.
The document syncing is fine, but with most of our usage now down to one laptop per family member, iCloud syncing of documents is something more like a lazy man’s backup. So we might start there.
Has anyone else done this? What were your experiences? If there is significant enough pain, we will probably suck it up for a bit longer. I just wish Apple made iCloud a bit more open to things like backups.
I’m nudging my wife to take our Apple One Premier account at 37 a month and drop down to the tier below which drops iCloud Storage to 200GB and axes Apple Fitness (which we never use) and New+ which my wife says she does use but is it worth 145 dollars a year?
I plan to augment our home storage with DAS (Direct Attached Storage) and a NAS. I don’t really see any reason why I need Apple to store my data for me. 20TB drives can be routinely found on sales in the low 200$ range.
I’ve waited for Cloud storage to deliver that “can’t give up” feature and none of them have cracked the Residential need at that level.
I’ll probably leverage my Chronosync and ChronoAgents better when i’m mostly local storage and my Backups will be via Chronosync and Carbon Copy Cloner with offsite backups to something like Backblaze.
I don’t think we’re alone. I see a movement towards de-cloudifying going on with lots of people. Eventually I will likely self host an Immich photo server for the sharing of family photos. I was less than pleased to come home from a Japan trip last March and when I went to share my album with my wife and Photos crashed multiple times.
We’ve upgraded and downgraded a few times. Photo de-duplicating apps are what really helped (they find long/bad videos, too.) Bonus: photo collections become nicer to browse.
For files, we unsynced documents and desktop on one computer where the user folders were being treated like junk drawers. A backup portable SSD is enough for that computer.
Gemini is made by MacPaw so I would avoid it. That said I just moved from 200GB > 2TB. Wish apple had a 500 GB or 1 TB plan or something. I don’t need 2TB of space and I hate paying $10 a month for it.
Instant buy! It’s fast but somehow I find it is reporting as duplicates files that to my knowledge are in the same location and are the same physical files perhaps they are Finder clones?. Will have to investigate.
Part of my journey to get back to the middle-tier iCloud plan is to slim down my Documents folder, and, if this works, then to encourage my other heavy user to do the same. Having moved at least half of the contents of the Documents folder elsewhere, I knew it would take iCloud a few days (at least) to match what I had.
