Tech: iCloud+ 6 and 12 Terabyte Plans and Apple One Premier Issues | Hacker News Reader

Tech: iCloud+ 6 and 12 Terabyte Plans and Apple One Premier Issues

adamchandler.me

49 pointscdme50 comments

I recently converted to iPhone and one of my largest frustrations has been icloud. As people keep reminding me, it’s apparently a “sync” service rather than a “backup” service, which means that you cannot control the behavior of when things get uploaded/downloaded, data versioning, or even access the data in a file-like way.

This left me really puzzled who the users are that are requesting 12TB of storage. I see such huge storage requirements as firmly in “power user” territory, yet the service lacks the administration tools that I would think power users would expect. IDK, maybe it’s just me, I would just be very nervous uploading multiple TB of precious photos/videos into a service that has no concept of versioning. I’m using Google Photos as well as OneDrive in addition to iCloud because it feels difficult to trust.

> who the users are that are requesting 12TB of storage.

Photo and video resolutions just keep going up and up.

I think the target group must be people that film a lot of video and take a lot of pictures.

Maybe there is some more LIDAR capture that Apple has planned too, or any other kind of 3D content, that will take a lot of storage

I used to be one of those people that had no clue why anyone would need more than 256 gb of storage for anything.

Until I started recording 1-2 hours of 4k video per week (40-80 GB / week). That comes to about 2-4 TB per year if I keep up at this rate.

Why not transcode the data after use to significantly reduce filesize? If the videos are uploaded elsewhere (e.g., YT) they're most certainly transcoded on such services anyway

transcoding sucks on phones IME. Samsung added a built in, pretty barebones transcoder but even then it's very slow (obviously) and doesn't run in the background. you can do it on a computer instead, without any cloud service, but then you are back to having to deal with manually transferring your files and managing them.

You're right - not ideal to manually transfer. Maybe iCloud will offer transcoding as a service next haha.

Many smartphones support recording H.265 encoded video directly and the resulting file size is tiny and quality is amazing. Not sure if it's the default setting (or possible) on iPhones though.

Yes, iPhones support recording to H.265 directly and have defaulted to it for a while.

Congrats! How old is your kid? ;)

Nope!

Got a drone (DJI mini 4) and record on most flights.

80GB/week is ~4TB/year.

Oops, fixed. Thanks

I'm a long way from 12TB, but I was relieved to see the new plans since I know I will eventually pass 2TB. As you mentioned, I consider iCloud basically for syncing and short-term backup of convenience, but I wouldn't trust it as a single point of failure for anything.

Photos I take with my real camera are backed up separately on a computer, separate drive, and off-site (Arq Backup to Wasabi). Photos I take with my phone are synced through iCloud to a computer with "Download entire library" enabled, which then has the same local and offsite backup.

The iCloud syncing has gotten more reliable over the years though in my experience. So I'm increasingly comfortable with it, but I'd still never fully trust my priceless data with any of the easy-but-no-control mainstream services like Apple or Google Photos.

This is the way, Arq is dead simple, cheap, and so is Wasabi.

Why Wasabi and not Backblaze?

Wasabi has a pretty much static price, whereas B2 has you pay for storage and misc fees depending on how much api calls and bandwidth you use.

I used to love Backblaze until I dug in a bit more and realized the product is unreliable.

Quoted from my own past comment[0]:

1. The client will lie to you and you never know what’s really backed up. Even if you use the secret alt-click to force a full drive scan, it can still miss files and tell you fully backed up when files from days ago are still nowhere to be found. Luckily I’ve never actually needed to do a restore, but I almost thought I did one time and would have been furious at all the missing files I noticed.

2. This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301626

So much this. I use Shapr3D on my iPad, my Macbook and my Windows desktop. I often need to export STLs or 3MFs for 3D printing from one to the other. On Windows, iCloud is an absolute trainwreck. It'll often get stuck on a single file and not update anything else. You never know when it will update. You actually never know when the iPad or iPhone is going to upload to iCloud. It's frustrating. There's no way to force it.

Obsidian is worse. I have an iCloud vault and often files will get duplicated for no reason on Windows.

If the iCloud app ever gets updated, the update notes are obtuse at best. Actually, I don't know if it's ever been updated since I was forcibly switched to the Windows Store version of it.

I don't understand the rationale at all.

For a product Steve Jobs dismissed as a feature rather than a product, Dropbox is still as far ahead of iCloud today as it was when he allegedly said that. Ridiculous that a company of Apple’s resources has mangled this so much.

Another related note: I just learned the hard way that Microsoft Office no longer auto-saves (nor is it capable of auto-saving) files unless they are in the OneDrive directory. What the fuck? This was a feature for as far back as I’ve used Word and they’ve just cut down its functionality to push people to use a single syncing folder, presumably to drive OneDrive adoption.

God I hate tech in 2023.

More space is just more space, I wouldn’t expect Apple to suddenly have pro tools for more space unless it’s a brand new product. Usually people use the space for photos/vid/icloud files

> I was a bit relieved having just done a full export of the 1.8 terabyte library to my Synology a few weeks ago

I've said it once, I'll say it again. I bought a Synology unit in 2017. I've touched it... once, since then. One drive failure, which was quite surprising because it will beep at ya, very loud. Ran down to Best Buy, swapped the drive, good to go.

While I would grade Google's cloud services as lower heartache than running your own (not heartache free, but nothing is); no one would say the same about iCloud, even after all these years, at any above average kind of utilization. Photos is... I mean, fine, its definitely silently lost photos on me, but 3-2-1 and such. People who intentionally use iCloud Drive, though; friends don't let friends use iCloud (without protection).

iCloud Drive sharing seems about as well executed as the alpha version of Dropbox. Maybe the MVP version of Dropbox.

I'm one of those people with two Apple IDs that I'll never be able to merge. One is my original iTunes account which has all my media purchases. The other is my iCloud account. The ordeal for merging them if you wanted to do it manually is this:

https://www.brianstucki.com/blog/how-to-manually-merge-two-a...

I don't know how many folks are in this situation, but obviously not enough for Apple to care about offering a solution.

Yep. I am in this situation too. It's absolutely brutal.

I've been slowly turning on more iCloud services, but am in a weird state where my media and purchases use my "preferred" iCloud account (name@gmail.com), while all of the other native iCloud services use my name@me.com account... which I can't figure out how to change to name@gamil.com.

I'm surprised there aren't more people who are in this situation. I got into this mess because Mobile Me required me to have a different account than my iTunes account (name@me.com), and then that eventually became iCloud, while app purchases and everything else stayed with my iTunes account.

I'd love to merge them, and I have absolutely no idea how to. I don't even think this guide that you linked to helps me much, to be honest. I'd be too afraid to lose something.

I am in this position and just gave up on trying to resolve... :(

Believe it or not, they can merge them.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is find the support engineer who knows that.

Wait, what? How.

I have two Apple IDs and I'd desperately love to merge them.

How? I have one account which all of my apps and media are associated, and the other which is my icloud account, so email, backups, etc etc.

I would love to consolidate them

These are not "Apple One Premier issues", these are "I didn't read" issues, so it surprises me that the guy went and wrote nearly 2000 words expecting others to read about it, but hey, it's his life.

> I didn’t read the fine print on Apple One’s product page that their Individual Plan at $16.95 a month was truly individual.

There are three plans: Individual, Family, and Premier. There's all of nineteen words describing the Family plan, of which "share with up to five people" makes up six. It does not take a degree in literature, scanning the EULA and its fine print, or searching for the scroll of truth in order to understand that the individual plan is for individuals, and the family plan is for families.

He clicked a button that says "not a family plan" and was horrifically shocked to discover that his family was no longer included on the plan. Quelle suprise.

After he realises that his clever plan of closing his eyes and clicking on the cheapest labelled button has not gone as well as he hoped, he contacts support. The support person kindly refunds the plans but that doesn't cancel services until their monthly roll-over date, so he's stuck with extra storage for a month.

> You can save $10 a month by forgoing News & Fitness giving your family 200GB of iCloud+ data before you purchase 6 or 12 terabytes of data but do it in the wrong order and you’re going to have a rough day.

This is not the correct takeaway from the experience. The correct takeaway is "at least read the name of the thing you're purchasing before purchasing it". I have about as much sympathy for this situation as if he had eaten an air freshener instead of an orange because it was cheaper and said "citrus" somewhere on the packaging. No one can help you if you can't help yourself.

I’d strongly disagree here. If I pick an individual plan tier from Spotify, YouTube or Microsoft, I would expect to be able to undo said change instantly and without 30 days notice. Apple put extra effort into making sure the launch of Apple One was billed correctly for people who already had subscriptions, but what they did not do was make subscription management any easier. This is proof.

The entire blog post is the stick-in-the-bike-spokes meme.

The man ate some laxative gummies, shit the bed, and is complaining that it took too long to clean up and all he wanted was to enjoy some candy, and how could anyone expect a layman to understand what the word "laxative" means anyway. The whole thing is just so obviously lacking in self-awareness & the intellectual honesty to admit that he caused his own problem in the first place.

My overall thrust is not that the support channel is red-hot and could have done nothing better, or that subscription management couldn't be improved, but the article's title would have been more honest if it said "I did a really boneheaded thing and Apple's support line could have been a little more helpful".

As to instant undo, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that you have to call support to undo subscription changes with no notice. There's a very reasonable method that Apple has put in place to prevent this happening, and it's called "naming the thing what it does and you shouldn't click it and proceed through the payment confirmation if you don't want it to happen to you".

Support couldn't fully fix it even with hours of effort. Something is very wrong and worth warning about there. Those are not reasonable consequences for buying the wrong thing.

I find it mildly interesting that Apple’s pricing scales linearly at these higher levels:

50GB: $0.99

200GB: $2.99

2TB: $9.99

6TB: $29.99

12TB: $59.99

Given they usually want to tempt you to make that step up to the next level I wonder if they consider 6TB and above to still be real niche territory.

Personally I’m conflicted about the whole thing. $29 a month for 6TB of storage feels insane. But I can’t argue with the utility of having all my photos accessible immediately.

Once upon a time I had an Apple router with hard disk storage, I’d love it if I could buy one today and have it contribute to my iCloud storage. Apple TVs already do more than just show videos: they’re HomeKit hubs. A future model could have an option for extra storage. But they’d never make as much money that way.

The prices seem high, but I haven't been able to find something comparable and also cheaper. For instance, at $6 per TB per month, BackBlaze B2 is a budget option:

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

Also, unlike Amazon and Microsoft's consumer offerings, BackBlaze and iCloud have never intentionally rug-pulled their customers (as far as I know)

Oh I know. I guess my disappointment is more rooted in a lack of at-home storage solutions. It would be entirely possible to sell a device like an Apple TV with extra storage that gets backed up to some equivalent of Amazon Glacier cheaply. But the appetite isn’t there on the side of the big tech companies.

Not that I’m surprised by that, why would they launch a more complicated, less reliable service that makes them less money? I guess in my dream world there’s an open protocol for services to interact with home storage (and market incentive to use it) instead of big tech controlling our interactions. But, alas.

> Oh I know. I guess my disappointment is more rooted in a lack of at-home storage solutions.

Time Machine still works well. Fun fact: Apple used to sell a "Time Machine device" in the form of the AirPort Extreme Base Station. Today, you can buy a cheap, easy-to-use NAS (QNAP TS-133 is $140 + drive cost) with Time Machine support for at-home backup.

and that's fine... for Time Machine. But you can't use Time Machine as an always-available, on-demand photo library.

True, but happily Apple Photos is really good for that part. I use Time Machine to back up that library, and also use Carbon Copy Cloner to back it up to a third place just because I’m paranoid.

Not sure I follow. NAS works fine at home (though it may still need a backup to a different physical location to reduce physical risks like fire or flooding)—-do you mean a solution that allows you to access NAS safely from any location?

I mean deep integration. I've tried a bunch of alternative photo backup software that'll save to a NAS, none of them are "family proof". One of the biggest selling points of iCloud is that it integrates so deeply with the iPhone photos app that you're not even aware of which photos are on your device and which aren't.

That level of integration simply isn't possible with third party solutions.

Thanks for the clarification.

A neo-Airport with a built in caching service + the TM stuff would be great. Having a local “hot cache” on iCloud makes so much sense. Ditching that product still defies any logical explanation.

I suspect they ditched it because most users would choose a one time cost of an airport versus ongoing cost of iCloud and not appreciate the value proposition of offsite storage.

Tech is not solved. These basic storage issues still cause problems when doing it yourself or when done by trillion dollar companies.

It’s amazing a thousand billion dollars can’t make iCloud work flawlessly.

Had a similar experience trying to change my billing country for Google One. The support staff would not reassure me that I wouldn't lose any data by cancelling my plan, waiting until it expires in a year, and resubscribing with the new payment method.

I asked multiple times and they just kept dodging the question - turns out you also do have a 30 day grace period in which you can resubscribe, so it worked out fine.

I am hoping this at least leads to competition in the high capacity consumer cloud storage market. Onedrive only allows you to buy an additional 1TB above the Microsoft 365 for a total of 2TB and they charge you an additional $10/month for that 1TB. I could go for 6TB of Onedrive for $30/month for sure.

I have been lazy and use iCloud as my only backup for photos and videos for a while now... whats the correct way to backup to another drive from iCloud?

Is there a script I can run, or do I need to just do an export from Photos.app to a backup target or something?

iCloud is a great sync service...until you try to use it as a storage service. I've had files mysteriously disappear on there. I absolutely don't trust it for critical items.

Couldn’t understand what you were saying either. I suspect there are a lot of edge cases. But usually you could just have the fam member unjoin your famil and then rejoin

i'm on the opposite side regarding these matters.

cloud is nice for sync.

but my backups I would rather have them on my own personal drives.

ssd's. + flash usb's. recently got sandisk flash drives 128gb / 12 GBP.

The prices aren’t terrible. I wonder how the latency, reliability and durability are?

Potential for arbitrage to use instead of s3? Hah (from my experience it seems unreliable but why?)

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