To be fair, the 5gig is free, and you can still back up your phone via a windows or Mac computer.
The 5 gigs of storage is really only good enough for things like system and device setting, and keeping preferences unified across devices. It’s not really a great solve for media or file backups. For that you either need to pay Apple, pay another cloud backup company, or backup locally to a computer.
I was surprised how quickly it filled up without me even thinking about it that I ended up disabling it. I just wish syncthing equivalents were better supported, since my Android, Microsoft, Steam Deck, and MacOS sync files without me having to really think about it.
But, iOS and iPadOS due to file access restrictions don’t work well with it, so it’s like they try to push you into iCloud by making everything annoying when it comes to files sync even with just the base iCloud. Good thing though is I just use an iPad now, which I use more as a media consumption device. No need to deal with iPhone annoyances, which would be much more important in trying to sync and transfer files as a multi platform user.
Apple does have a setting for regular, automatic, local backups. Though I wish they could do that while also automatically backing up to iCloud. My iCloud backup is under 5 but that’s partly because lots of stuff is already stored in iCloud. I think the real issue for a lot of people is when they have multiple devices, like work and personal phones and/or iPad or two, that all want to backup to that 5 GB. I always thought a compromise like the first 5 GB of a devices iCloud backup doesn’t count towards the iCloud storage. This solves the multiple device backups issue and still keeps a modest base amount of storage so people with just one device still have an incentive to purchase additional storage.
To be fair, the 5gig is free, and you can still back up your phone via a windows or Mac computer.
The 5 gigs of storage is really only good enough for things like system and device setting, and keeping preferences unified across devices. It’s not really a great solve for media or file backups. For that you either need to pay Apple, pay another cloud backup company, or backup locally to a computer.
I was surprised how quickly it filled up without me even thinking about it that I ended up disabling it. I just wish syncthing equivalents were better supported, since my Android, Microsoft, Steam Deck, and MacOS sync files without me having to really think about it.
But, iOS and iPadOS due to file access restrictions don’t work well with it, so it’s like they try to push you into iCloud by making everything annoying when it comes to files sync even with just the base iCloud. Good thing though is I just use an iPad now, which I use more as a media consumption device. No need to deal with iPhone annoyances, which would be much more important in trying to sync and transfer files as a multi platform user.
Apple does have a setting for regular, automatic, local backups. Though I wish they could do that while also automatically backing up to iCloud. My iCloud backup is under 5 but that’s partly because lots of stuff is already stored in iCloud. I think the real issue for a lot of people is when they have multiple devices, like work and personal phones and/or iPad or two, that all want to backup to that 5 GB. I always thought a compromise like the first 5 GB of a devices iCloud backup doesn’t count towards the iCloud storage. This solves the multiple device backups issue and still keeps a modest base amount of storage so people with just one device still have an incentive to purchase additional storage.