What is iCloud?

Photos

> For many of us, Photos is the killer app of iCloud: by storing all our images and videos in the cloud it doesn’t matter what device we’re using when we want to look at or edit our photos and movies: they’re available on our Macs, iPhones, iPads and Apple TVs. It can make sure your photos don’t take up too much room on any device, and it also enables you to share your photos with friends and family.

Two-factor authentication

>Your various iCloud services use the familiar Apple ID and password, but for even better security you can set up two-factor authentication. This adds an extra layer of security that makes it much harder for various villains to get into your iCloud account. Apple also enables you to set up appspecific passwords, which are one-off passwords for apps or online services that want to use your iCloud data.

Files

> Files enables you to access any of the files you store in iCloud Drive (and other cloud services) on your mobile devices, so you can open a document you made on your Mac and edit it on your iPhone. If it’s a music file, iCloud can stream it instantly; if it’s a document, you can open it in the appropriate app. Files can also delete, duplicate, rename, tag, share, and even compress files for you.

Family Sharing

>Your iCloud subscription can be shared with up to five other people, enabling them to use your iCloud storage for their files and photos or access apps and other content you’ve bought on iTunes, the App Store or Apple Books. Each person’s data is kept separate so there’s no danger of the kids accessing your work stuff, and you can use iCloud’s Find My feature to locate family members’ lost devices.

Personal Data

> In addition to personal documents and photos, iCloud can also store other personal data such as contacts, passwords, credit cards and other key information and synchronise it across your devices – so for example when you access a new Wi-Fi network on your Mac, your iPhone and iPad get the login details too; when you’re accessing a secure website, the logins are available on all your Apple hardware.

Privacy

>This is something that’s worth shouting about, because many tech companies offer free or relatively inexpensive online products or services in exchange for permission to mine your personal data for all kinds of reasons, including trying to sell you things or selling your data to advertisers. Apple doesn’t do that, and all of your iCloud data is encrypted so that nobody, not even Apple, can access it.

iTunes

> iCloud integrates tightly with Apple Music, but you don’t need an Apple Music subscription to use it for music. It synchronises your iTunes purchases across all your authorised hardware, and if you subscribe to iTunes Match it can create a full cloud-based copy of your entire music library that you can access from any of your devices. It can even replace your old audio files with better quality versions.

Find my devices

>You can use the Find My app or iCloud.com to locate your devices and those of your family, to make them play a sound so you can find them or to lock them down if you think they’re lost or stolen. We’ve lost count of the times the app has helped us locate misplaced iPads or make our iPhone ping from down the side of the sofa. Just remember to turn Find My off before you sell or give away your device.

iOS backups

> One of the most important iCloud features is one you’ll rarely notice: if you have enough iCloud storage available (we’ll talk about that in more detail on page 24), it can create a backup of your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and update it automatically and regularly. You can then use that backup to recover from disaster, or set up a brand new Apple device with all your preferred apps and settings.

Access anywhere

> In addition to your various Apple devices you can access your iCloud content via Apple’s iCloud.com website – and that works on any modern browser, so you can open or download files, check mail or use Find My from anywhere you can get on the internet. If you haven’t already done so, make sure you’ve enabled two-factor authentication if you’re going to be using iCloud.com from other people’s computers.