Difference between Apple extra storage & using your home hard drive??

B0bbyEwing

I have a WD MyCloud Home which is what I'm referring to in this question.

My mother this week said she couldn't back up her iPhone any longer - ran out of space. After questioning on how much she values the contents on there, she'd be devastated if she lost all her photos & videos. 

So I'm basically wanting to know what's the difference between in her case - paying for extra apple storage & using that to backup or using my MyCloud Home to back up her photos?


AFAIK, if she uses my MyCloud Home, it will only back up her photos, nothing else. No apps, no settings, no passwords, just photos.
If she uses the extra Apple storage, I don't know if it also backs up those things I mentioned in addition to photos or whether it's also just photos??

Also, I know from my own experience that photos backed up to the MyCloud Home stay there. If you start fresh & take 10 photos, 10 photos will be backed up to the MyCloud Home. If you delete a photo from your phone, your phone will have 9 photos but the MyCloud Home will still show 10.

Unless there's a setting in there that I'm not aware of which will also delete from the MCH?

As for the way that Apple manage that side of things, I have no idea whether it deletes it from the paid extra storage also or whether it is the same as my MCH experience where the photo will remain in the cloud but be deleted from the phone?


For the record, I'm fully aware if she goes for the Apple storage, she could also use my MCH for extra bases being covered but just trying to determine whether it's worth her paying for Apple storage or not.

400ixl

Your WD MyCloud is far more likely to be hacked (as previous versions have been). If your house burns down then the backup is gone. WD only support the software for a finite amount of time and have previously shut off the cloud sync capability for older versions.

Apple continue to spend billions on keeping everything secure, backing up across multiple locations and as a subscription service keep it avaialbe (although there are no guarantees that will be forever).

The real answer is if you don't have it in 3 locations on 3 different services then you don't really have a secure backup. So on the phone, on the cloud and on your WD would make sense. If the option was only two I'd go with on the phone and in the cloud.

Personally I have mine on the device, on the Google Cloud, One Microsoft cloud and on Amazon cloud. I used to run a local NAS, but that is really not worth it nowadays.

B0bbyEwing

Makes sense.

What does the Apple storage backup then? Been a while since I've been an Apple customer so not so sure. Asking as what it backs up may impact storage plan.

Is it just photos or is it a total image of the phone (inc. apps, settings, everything?)

Back when I was last an Apple customer I remember backing up my iPhone to iTunes on the PC & from this backup I could buy a new iPhone and it would set it up exactly like my old iPhone was - a mirror image.

Android doesn't seem to be quite that good, but does a decent job.

So is it like that or is it just photos/videos?

PHK

ICloud does four main things:

Storage you can access using the Files app

A complete backup of your phone/device (as long as you don't turn backup off)  So if you get a new phone or reset your phone you can restore from iCloud. By default everything is backed up but you can configure.

Synchronise all the devices on your account eg messages, contacts. This can also be configured or turned off.

Sync your photos. This can be turned off. When storage gets tight on the phone it will store a low resolution version on the phone and download the original from iCloud when you want to view it. If you delete a photo it moves to Recently Deleted and after 30 days will be completely deleted on all devices and I Cloud.

B0bbyEwing

Thank you for the info. 

How do you configure what is backed up? 

Just so that when I go through it with my mother she can take a look at what her options are & then make a decision. 

chrisw

It also depends to some extent how comfortable your mother is with technology. For my mother, it was much easier to simply pay the 79p a month (or 99p I think it is now), then she has a complete back up if she ever drops, loses or gets a new phone. She can now take photos to her heart's content and I doubt she will ever fill the 15Gb.

PHK

It's as easy as Settings/Your Apple ID/iCloud or iCloud+

DullGreyGuy

B0bbyEwing said:

Thank you for the info. 

How do you configure what is backed up? 

Just so that when I go through it with my mother she can take a look at what her options are & then make a decision. 

Just be conscious of how iCloud works with Photos... with it turned on in iCloud and the correct setting in the Photos app iCloud will store the full size original and effectively thumbnails will be stored on the phone, when you want to view a photo it then pulls down the full size. If you delete something off the phone it also deletes off the iCloud (well it goes into a trash can for 28 days then deletes).

It is fairly effective though, we've about 600GB of images which only takes up about 15GB on the phone, as the phone starts to fill up it will reduce the cache of images and quality of older thumbnails.  

Have had people who thought as the photos were on the cloud they could all be deleted off the phone and a month later realise they're all gone. 

oldernonethewiser

This chap does some good videos and here is a recent one explaining iCloud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flAVZHpwDwg

B0bbyEwing

DullGreyGuy said:

B0bbyEwing said:

Thank you for the info. 

How do you configure what is backed up? 

Just so that when I go through it with my mother she can take a look at what her options are & then make a decision. 

Just be conscious of how iCloud works with Photos... with it turned on in iCloud and the correct setting in the Photos app iCloud will store the full size original and effectively thumbnails will be stored on the phone, when you want to view a photo it then pulls down the full size. If you delete something off the phone it also deletes off the iCloud (well it goes into a trash can for 28 days then deletes).

It is fairly effective though, we've about 600GB of images which only takes up about 15GB on the phone, as the phone starts to fill up it will reduce the cache of images and quality of older thumbnails.  

Have had people who thought as the photos were on the cloud they could all be deleted off the phone and a month later realise they're all gone. 

Thanks very much for that. 
Not being an Apple user & never really having the need to bother with this when I was, I know absolutely zero about it.

oldernonethewiser said:

This chap does some good videos and here is a recent one explaining iCloud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flAVZHpwDwg

Great. I'll pass this along. Thanks.

joeypesci

You can pay Apple and backup to their cloud but cloud backup shouldn't only be relied on. 3 2 1 backup is the idea. You have the backup of all the important stuff one 3 different media. You could do two hdds and the cloud so the cloud will be your offsite backup. You'll want to look at Apples policy. I assume they have small print that they don't backup their cloud storage offers unless you pay for the redundancy.