Can somebody 'plain I-Cloud to me?

[DGS49]

The cloud - whatever that is - is very upset with me. It sent me the following warning:

"Important: If you do not purchase additional storage or reduce the amount of storage you’re using soon, you will not be able to send or receive messages with your iCloud email address, [blah]@icloud.com."

Of course, they want some teensy-teensy bit of money from me - $0.99/mo.- but I'm a senior citizen on a fixed income, and...well...it's not enough to worry about, but the questions are:

(a) How could I reduce my I-Cloud "stuff" so that I am not overburdening the amorphous mass called the Cloud?, and

(b) Should I just go ahead and do it, just to stop the messages?

 

[fncceo]

"The Cloud" is storage space that exists on The Internet.

Major ISPs and other providers have server farms and you can buy space on them to store your stuff. That storage space is accessible from anywhere in the world where The Internet exists ... so, everywhere.

When you use up all your space, they sell you more.

Have you thought about just deleting your old, useless emails to clear up some space so you don't have to buy more?

 

[Gabe Lackmann]

Dipshits paying people to store their data so that the government and the Chinese can pilfer through it.

External hard drives people...averages about $40 per terabyte.

That's about 200,000 pictures of your lunch and you making duck faces...fuckin drones.

 

[Maxdeath]

I cloud gives you a (I believe 5 gigabit storage space) for free. The information from your IPhone and/or iPad is backed up on their servers each night. Once you get close to the free limit they start sending out that message.
The idea is that if you upgrade to a new IPhone or IPad you can download all your backup data onto the new gadget and you will have all your contacts, photos, bookmarks, etc on the new device. Not a bad feature if you loose or kill your device by accident.

 

[fncceo]

Of course, you can create your own cloud, at home, also accessible from The Internet. You will own it and it will be totally private ... but it will take more time and money than you currently spend on I-Cloud services.

Also, depending on your Internet's upload speed, significantly slower to access when you're away from home.

 

[WorldWatcher]

(a) How could I reduce my I-Cloud "stuff" so that I am not overburdening the amorphous mass called the Cloud?, and

#1 Move things from your Apple devices to local storage (pictures, movies, PDF files, etc.). Presumably on your computer, then make that part of your backup to an external storage device. Once you have a safe copy of things you want to keep, then delete them from your Apple Device and your iCloud storage. That will reduce the size to hopefully below the free limit.

#2 Another thing that can help, but is more tedious is to go back and delete old emails. Low hanging fruit is normally SPAM you may get from certain addresses. Sort by those addresses and delete in bulk.

WW

 

[TroglocratsRdumb]

just use a hard drive or a memory stick, they are cheaper and more secure

 

[DGS49]

Thanks.

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Holy Cow... you must use your email for work also I presume? And that work email receives large attachments??
Gmail for instance comes with 15 GB of storage. That is a HUUUGE amount of storage.
At work we run into the paywall regularly, but we are a printer. And receive multi-MB files many times a day.
How an average user runs into a paywall... holy cow. For instance my home gmail account I have used for many years has only 2.5GB of used data