Files, Documents & iCloud Drive
Get everything you need anywhere on any device
iCloud Drive is also available on Windows: the official iCloud app makes iCloud Drive available on Windows PCs and works much like it does in your Mac’s Finder, adding iCloud as a network drive in File Explorer.
You can access files on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with Apple’s Files app, and you can also access iCloud. com from pretty much any modern computer that has an up-to-date web browser. Once logged in you can then access, interact with and download your files or photos.
iCloud Drive is a wonderful thing, especially if you use multiple Apple devices. It works like an external drive, but instead of connecting to a USB, Lightning or Thunderbolt port it connects via the internet. To your device it looks like a drive, works like a drive and responds like a drive, but everything is stored on Apple’s servers. The only limits are the amount of storage in your iCloud account and a 50GB maximum for each individual file.
You can use iCloud Drive in two key ways. iCloud-enabled apps use it to store documents automatically, so for example your Pages docs or Keynote presentations save to the cloud so you can open iPad documents on your Mac and vice versa. GarageBand does it too, so you can come up with tunes on the move, save them on your iPhone and pick up on your Mac later. On a Mac you can also get iCloud to mirror your Desktop and Documents folders, which means their contents are available on all your Apple devices. We use that one all the time.
The other way to use iCloud Drive is as if it were an external hard disk or SSD. In Finder it appears right there in the Finder under iCloud, and on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, you can access it in the Files app. There’s also an iCloud for Windows app that enables you to access your iCloud Drive from a PC. iCloud also enables you to share documents and collaborate with other people, so for example you can share a Pages document with a colleague and work on it together or just share the songs you’ve been making in GarageBand. You can share from within iCloud-enabled apps, or you can do it from the Finder (Mac) or Files (iOS/iPadOS).
The only problem with iCloud Drive is that it’s sharing storage that other services also use, such as your iCloud Photos and your iOS backups. It’s worth keeping an eye on your storage (Settings > Apple ID > iCloud on iOS/ iPadOS; System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud on Mac) and removing anything you don’t want. If you hit the limit then you’ll have to upgrade to iCloud+. At the time of writing that’s 79p a month for 50GB, £2.49 for 200GB and £6.99 for 2TB.