I have family sharing setup. I have purchased an additional chunk of storage and my son has too ( using my account ) but both those chunks of storage are billed separately. I want to upgrade to the max storage plan and consolidate everything.
How should I go about this to ensure I don’t loose any data and also get best value for money. I looked around but can’t find any Apple support that explains my situation.
Thanks!
Normally, you buy the 2TB and invite your son into the family (part of something called Family Sharing). Your son must have a different Apple ID as yours, of course.
It is really a simple process as @Topre outlines. Your son will no longer be billed monthly for his storage, he will see the new combined storage limit, and his data will remain as it was.
This all assumes his data will fit into your plan. I imagine you will get an error if his data would exceed your free space. It’s really quite well implemented. I recently just added my wife and kids as a family sharing.
Thanks. What confused me though is that our family sharing group already exists and he is a member of it. I was confused by the fact I have been able to purchase additional storage and my son has as well. Does that make sense.
Obviously in the transition to one chunk of (larger) storage I don’t want to loose any of his data.
Thanks. We already have family sharing setup. I have an additional 200gb of storage and he has purchased 200gb, which gets billed to my family sharing credit card. I’m wondering what happens when I upgrade to 2Tb?
Oh, then you have to go to your son’s phone and tap that he wanted to share the iCloud. Apple will pro rate and refund to you the differences. He can be in your family sharing and yet have his own “iCloud Storage” subscription. It’s two different thing. Family sharing means he shared your purchased apps, movies, eBooks. Storage is a separate thing.
See here:
edit to add: I have a similar setup. My wife and I were on a 200GB each. Then we almost reached 200GB due to photos and videos and I upgraded mine to 2TB. I invited her to be part of the Family Plan and then she changed her Storage to be combined with mine. And the phone instantly showed that she has more storage than 200GB. That’s it. No data migration needed. No losing of data. It’s probably a switch at the backend to say that her storage can now scale to as much as 2TB.
Awesome. Thanks. Really appreciate your help with this!