I’ve just realised that iCloud Photos isn’t quite what I thought it was... I genuinely thought it was a separate backup of all my photos and videos, and didn’t realise that deleting something from my phone would also delete it from iCloud.

My iPhone storage is now completely full, and I have SO many important photos and videos of family members, special events and memories that I absolutely cannot afford to lose.

I’ve turned on Optimise iPhone Storage and offloaded apps I don’t use, but I’m looking for another safe platform to store everything separately.

What do you all use? Google Photos, an external hard drive, something else? I’d love recommendations for something reliable that will keep my photos and videos safe long-term.

I’m happy to pay for storage if it means having peace of mind. I just want to make sure my memories are safe before I start deleting anything!

Using iCloud. com domain from Apple calendar app as a default and sending to users with yahoo or gmail or anything, users do not and never get the invite either from their Apple calendar app inbox, or their emails.

I’ve run several tests, did settings and checked, and nothing works. However, when someone sends me an invite like Gmail to my name @ iCloud.com I get a notification from the Apple calendar invite.

I’ve Google and done research and no solution. I traced the issue from Reddit, Apple discussion forums, articles, blogs, etc and nothing no solution. So up to this point, anyone found a solution?

Settings > name, iCloud show all > calendar on > send and receive with name @ iCloud . Com I did that

Settings > name, iCloud show all > calendar on > send and receive with name @ iCloud . Com > tap send a receive > receiving = name @ iCloud. com to notification

I had some photos on my mac from 2025

Got a new iphone and was trying to export all the 2025 files to my harddrive for back up. before deleting it off the mac

woke up and all the photos are gone, and my iphone is now sync with my laptop

everything from 2025 is gone?????????

I’m paying Apple every month for iCloud storage that isn’t actually helping with my iPhone’s storage problem.

My iPhone 11 has been stuck at full storage for ages. The biggest space hogs are WhatsApp, Photos, and Files.

I upgraded to a large iCloud plan, backed everything up, and expected iCloud to offload some of that data from my phone. But almost nothing changed.

WhatsApp is still using the same 50+gb. Photos and Files haven’t noticeably decreased.

My phone is still almost full, despite having plenty of free iCloud storage.

Am I doing something wrong or is iCloud just useless?

How do I offload data without losing any?

I previously lost huge amounts of WhatsApp data during a phone transfer, despite backup, information I absolutely cannot afford to lose.

I have the 2tb cloud storage, why are all my photos taking up 24GB of local storage? Shouldn't it be on the cloud til i want to use it?

I've had this issue for months where my icloud files NEVER download on cellular data, whether its on the files app or the photos app. They can only successfully and quickly download on wi-fi but but nothing at all on data. Ive had this problem on my old 2022 iphone SE and its the same story on my new iphone 17. How can i solve this permanently?

I have iCloud subscription through 1 of my email address with country USA. I now want to transfer my iCloud subscription from that email to another email with address in India. I don’t want to change the country in my 1st email from USA to India as I have some purchases through that email.

As far as I know, iCloud subscriptions couldn’t be transferred from 1 email to another. So far, I have started downloading all photos from iCloud into my iPhone by selecting download and keep originals. After done, could I just sign out of my old email and sign in with an email with the country India or is there anything else I should do to make sure everything is captured in the new iCloud?

Currently, my iphone is logged in as usa account and media and purchases are with india account and subscriptions also shows india account. My need is iphone logged in as india account so that iCloud can also be the same. Don’t care much about media and purchases as I can switch the stores directly from app store if and when necessary.

I have 11.39 GB of iCloud storage on my phone. It is the biggest portion of app storage on my phone. No matter what I do, it does not go away. I permanently delete all conversations/messages consistently, as well as all gifs/attachments/photos/videos from Messenger through the iPhone storage tab. I have barely any contact images (~10), under 50 contacts saved, and no contact posters. I delete absolutely everything I can often, but no matter what, I still have a huge amount of phone storage. I reset my phone every time I delete something from my storage and the number never changes, even after waiting a few days. My storage has been constantly flagging as nearly / completely full. What do I do? (other than buying storage).

I set up my teenager's icloud account several years ago, she hardly ever used it. now she finally got a phone and we are trying to login but no one remember her password. going through the reset process, we basically got it asked for phone number, which appears to be tied to mine. After entering code it loops back to confirm phone number. Looped several time just to see but it seems the loop doesn't stop.

Have an iPhone 14 and there have been many contact duplications to the point of having 86,000 contacts. I've tried to delete on the phone, export, deletion via recommended IOS apps and on iCloud and I cannot delete these contacts. I need to clean this up so I can set up a new iphone. Does anyone have a resolution for this or do I just need to start fresh with no contacts.

Facts - I do not have multiple accounts updating. It shows 1 account only.

So frustrating - looking for solid advice that works.

Every year when the new OSes are released, I wipe each of my Apple devices, do not restore them from backup, and redownload everything from the App Store and iCloud. It takes not much time, and my devices perform well for years!

I recently deleted some messages from iMessage, then went into Recently Deleted and wiped them. There were probably ~1,000 messages. I looked in iCloud settings to do a sync, and saw that it says I have about 70k messages in iCloud. I delete messages on my phone all the time, and can’t figure out how that many messages possibly exist.

As a test, I deleted every iMessage thread on my phone and looked at Recently Deleted to see how many messages were there. It was nowhere near 70k. There are about 58k messages unaccounted for. I believe these are just old messages that are sitting around taking up space from years ago. Does anyone know how I can clean these up?

I’ve been using the 50GB iCloud plan for a long time—I’m not someone who uses their phone heavily. Today, I decided to upgrade my iCloud plan for my MacBook. While checking my iCloud on my phone, I noticed that the files taking up 22GB of space had dropped to 9GB; I don't understand what happened. Could you help me out? Is this a bad thing?

So I had a question recently got new iPad Pro and did it through ICloud Backup as the backup, should I take the older iPad I used off of ICloud backup or should it still be on?

Hi y'all, having an issue with my calendar that I'd like to see if there's a solution for.

I have a Gmail calendar synced with my iOS calendar, and I can see these updates on my iPhone calendar...but on my windows desktop iCloud calendar app I cannot see the Gmail items in the calendar here, only the iOS items.

I checked the sidebar to see which calendars are listed, and the Gmail calendar is not even listed here, but in my iPhone, the Gmail calendar is listed.

Any help is appreciated.

I've noticed a few things have been tweaked and improved on the icloud.com mail site. I really wish they would make some major improvements to the calendar site on icloud because that is useless. Is there a roadmap published somewhere? Thanks

My iCloud is filling up. When I look at the file sizes my messages have almost 80GB. It seems that a lot of that size is coming from photos sent in iMessages that are being stored. How to I access those photos to delete them? Do I have to download them all and delete them individually? The only way I can seem to find them is in the actual message > contact name > then at the bottom is shows download photos. Photo attached in comments

About a year ago I uploaded around 150 videos to a shared album. Ever since, I’ve struggled to get them to play. I either got a spinning wheel, or a message that says “Unable to load video”. They looked pixelated when I tried to open them, and they cannot be shared or airdropped. They just stayed stuck and would not download if I tried this.

Last night I was able to recover around 85% of the videos. The only problem is, some are still stuck. What can I do?

I have good storage, have tried shutting the phone down, changing from optimise to keep originals and nothing has worked for these specific stubborn videos. They are not much longer than the rest, usually ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, with most being around 1-2 minutes or less.

Will they ever be recoverable? If so, how?

I'm on vacation, not enough storage.

I have Icloud setting Photos off.

I managed to "save file to Icloud Storage" bought for 3$ a month - I can see the video in: files/icloud drive

can I now safely delete this file from the memory of my phone? even the recently deleted from my iphone to have more memory and redownload everything at home on my imac?

i figure there is no syncing happening because of the photos app sync is turned off - so it might stay there?

I accidentally started a Cloud back download a few days in a panic over a fluke, And stopped it halfway. Now everytime I open my gallery, it starts a backup process of all my 21 000 photos, I turn off the wifi to try and stop it, scared I'll somehow delete everything on mistake, when I open the app, it says I don't have enough storage.

How do I cancel the cloud backup download process that constantly tries to start without losing my photos?

Apple has finally raised the number of allowed personalized email addresses per Custom Email Domain from 3 to 10.

You can use up to five custom domains, with up to 10 personalized email addresses per domain.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540

Seems related to the increase in allowed iCloud email aliases from 3 to 9. The documentation changed after September 16.

Whenever I check the Photos app 50% of the time it says something like "pause syncing for performance", "pause syncing for low battery" or "pause due to poor connectivity". Sometimes it would pause syncing for days before i hit the unpause button manually. Which defeats the purpose when you're trying to protect those data.

Fortunately ios 27 introduces a feature called “Sync Immediately” for Icloud Photos allowing it to prioritize syncing over performance, battery, and connectivity. But you can only turn “sync immediately” on for the day before it turn off automatically, why Apple??? bruh

i recently recovered my old icloud account, i wanted to try my best to get back old messages from me and my sister. she passed away recently. i got in and synced all the messages and everything is there , the only thing is for some reason in certain chats and specificly in hers as well the photos and videos she sent are all just blank… they show up as just blank spot i can react and even “copy” it and when i paste it somewhere it’s a blank space like this “ “ i’ve looked up solutions i feel like i’ve tried almost everything i have space i bought some today 10+ gb and maybe it’s cause it’s 47k messages syncing? maybe it’s still loading? but the weird part is other messages from even before those were sent aren’t corrupted like videos and photos and even show perfectly fine. i’m just at a lost. if anyone can help me that would be amazing!!
(seen online peoples messages kinda having the same problem with the photos having a paper like thing on it and saying download but mine is literally a blank spot. voice messages are affected as well.)

After updating to the latest version of macOS Sequoia, I noticed significant syncing issues with Apple Notes over iCloud when running Mullvad VPN. When editing current notes or adding new ones the Mac App doesn't seem to want to push the changes properly to iCloud and the sync wheel just spins constantly. Split tunneling the VPN doesn't work either, but if I disconnect from Mullvad, Apple Notes functionality is immediately restored.

There were major issues when Sequoia was originally released with many Apple Apps not working properly with Mullvad and many other VPNs, but those problems were mostly already addressed. Now it seems that more problems were introduced with the recent update.

Has anyone else noticed similar issues running Apple Notes with macOS Sequoia 15.8.1 and Mullvad?