First of all, I think I have good digital hygiene. But I often ask myself questions about scenarios I haven’t planned for, and it’s a bit anxiety-inducing.

I’ve gone through Apple’s documentation, but some points are not clear enough for me.

I only own an iPhone. I don’t have any other trusted devices. I’ve enabled ADP, saved the recovery key in multiple secure locations, and also added two recovery contacts.

I’ve read countless Reddit threads, and there doesn’t seem to be any absolute truth. Everyone tries to run their own tests and interpret Apple’s help articles, which isn’t always easy.

Now, back to my scenario. Let’s say my iPhone gets stolen, or something else happens. In an emergency, I log in to my new iPhone, enter my email and password, but since 2FA is enabled and I don’t have another trusted device, I receive an SMS. The problem is that I no longer have the iPhone to receive it. So, I end up locked out. The solution would be to deactivate the eSIM and import it into another phone (not the one I’m trying to activate) to receive the code, right ?

In this case, my recovery contacts are useless since they only help in case of a forgotten password.

Wouldn’t it be wise to add a second trusted phone number? (For example, my wife’s or a parent’s). I normally avoid this because 2FA via SMS is the weakest link in 2FA security.

What’s your strategy regarding this?

Additionally, I’m still trying to figure out if having a recovery key disables recovery contacts, since it seems that if I forget my password, I need to have the recovery key, a trusted phone number, or a trusted device in my possession. Si no recovery contact are involved ?

I’m thinking of getting an iCloud plan and uploading my photos to my iCloud. I asked some questions about this and people were talking about photos deleting from your phone? If I upload my photos to my iCloud, will they delete from my photos app?

I’m currently on the 50 GB plan and I’ve been trying to downgrade it to the free plan but it’s not allowing me. The done button just turns grey and I don’t know what to do, does anyone have a solution?

Im trying to upload 5000 photos and its been two days and it has synced via icloud yet nor can I do the icloud link thing

I am not able to access my iCloud it is not clickable.

My phone went missing and marked it as lost… however it would do it as phone was offline. I’ve since found the phone but my apple pay’s been suspended bc of lost mode. How do I mark phone as found again as it still saying phone is offline.

I currently am an idrive user who backs up about 1TB of data. This data is split between a dozen iphoto libraries on my imac and an equal amount (in size) of music files on my windows computer. These numbers aren't growing much anymore. I use this idrive backup like a safety deposit box, so to speak.

I was considering this year moving to icloud primarily for the drive feature, but also because I have 3 iphone users, and it feels like the cost is similar to idrive but with a lot of extra value for us apple users.

I've been trying to read the documentation for iCloud Drive for pc, and it's hard to tell how well it will replace idrive and how much inconvenience there will be. I'd love some feedback here - and these are the main issues I see (lmk if I'm missing anything): * I'd have to consolidate all of my icloud drive source data to 1 root folder on one PC. * I can't use icloud drive for multiple PCs under my personal account. * Any time I want to do file operations on the local PC's backed up files, I have to start from File Explorer > iCloudDrive (Navigation Pane).

I don't work with these files on a daily or monthly basis, so a few days of work wouldn't be terrible, but I just wonder if I'd be cursing myself for relying on icloud drive for a windows-based solution.

The macbook that I currently use was given to me by my ex-wife when we were married since she switched to a PC. I am trying to make this Macbook "mine" by signing into the icloud so it will be in sync with everything on my iphone. The issue is that it is asking me for my ex-wife's mothers Apple ID password and will not let me sign out of it. I no longer talk to her so I have no way of obtaining it. Is there any solution for me to sign out of her iCloud or am I stuck with it?

icloud down for everyone or just me? cant get into mail

Forgive me- I believe this is sort of addressed in previous threads. But I read through them and still cannot seem to get a straight answer.

My iCloud space profile reads: “Backups: 59.6 GB iCloud Photos: 26.7 GB”

Pretend I’m a 5 year old— when it comes to some of this stuff I basically am. Can anyone explain why iCloud backups take up SO much space? Why is that top line number so big? Nothing else listed come close to touching photos…in fact nothing else listed is even in the GB territory.

Help me understand why I’m paying for more iCloud storage than I think I need! TIA

I use a mini ipad as a planner. I want to share only my planner (not all the other stuff i have on my mini) with my iphone so that I dont always have to carry the mini but can access my calendar from my phone. But I am considering using my full-size ipad for some planning just bc it’s bigger… so I’d want to share everything with the big ipad. Can you pick and choose what you share on which device? Right now I have sharing turned off entirely.

This could really be in the TIFU sub. Sigh.

Had to sign in to my daughter’s iCloud on my device to help with something (yes, please no admonishing. I realize the error now.). My data including passwords and photos (as far as I know so far) got merged so when we signed her out she ended up with my photos and passwords on her device.

I have some notes that are locked on my phone. I use face id to unlock them. If they show up on her phone, can she unlock them?

If someone has previous experience with this I would greatly appreciate your help.

I messed up. I was trying to make space and I wiped out all my notes, on both my phone and iCloud.

On my phone I did setting —> icloud —> manage account storage —> notes —> delete

Afterwards all my notes were gone. I even tried logging into my iCloud and it’s gone there too. If I click recently deleted, it’s all gone there too. This happened earlier today, so it seems like everything got permanently wiped?

Is there any chance I can get my notes back, as I have important documents

I noticed that I deleted a conversation yesterday, however it was permanently deleted today without me doing anything. Don’t they usually stay in recently deleted for 30 days. Is there any way to get that conversation back?

I’m trying to get a verification code from a game called genshin ,but the code is not even popping up in junk .how to fix this ?

Uhhh might be a dumb question, but is your Apple ID connected to your iCloud at all? So if I change my Apple ID, would my notes delete themselves since I’m using a new Apple ID?

This only work if you have a custom domain and use "catch all". As far as I know this is not really possible but there's a simple hack to reply from a catch-all adress.

I'm going to assume that you are not using 3 aliases for you custom domain-mail already, if you do then this then you need to remove one of them temporarily.

Instructions: Go to iCloud settings -> Mail -> Custom Domain -> Choose your domain -> Add alias (and you can set a fake name, i.e John Doe).
Add the catch-all-alias you want to reply from, ie. "this-is-a-fake-name@customdomain.com"

Now return back to the mail you want to answer, the newly created alias will be default when replying as long as it was adressed to that alias.

When done, remove alias.

Catch: You can only have max 3 aliases. But my take is that you seldom need to reply from an catch-all, so creating/removing them on need-basis is worth it.

If this is well know, sorry. I haven't found anyone mention it.

My iCloud is on my outlook. Does it affect my iCloud and all data in my phone?

It's impossible to send emails from the hidden email account.

I previously used hidden email to create an alias account for a 3rd party subscription. In order to cancel the subscription I need to email the 3rd party using the hidden email but this is impossible to do.

I can't compose a new message with the hidden email account. I've also tried multiple times to reply to an email that was sent from the 3rd party to the hidden email, this does not work either. When I click 'reply' it shows the From field as the hidden email, but it doesnt actually send from this email, it sends from parent Apple ID email.

So now I'm stuck with a 3rd party account I cannot close.

My iCloud takes up 5GB and like currently my phone is like out of storage, mostly from my photos. My photos and some other apps are using my 5GB of iCloud storage, but there is still 4GB left of my iCloud storage, so why isn’t my photos taking up that space? I have 127/128 GB and going from that to 123/128 would lowkey be a big help😭 anyone know what’s going on?

Hey,

I want to cancel my 200gb iCloud subscription as I have a way bigger photos library and want to use another cloud provider.

How can I ensure that all photos & videos within the Photos app on my Mac are downloaded? I turned on the specific setting "keep originals on this Mac" but it does not seem to download everything stored online (as my iCloud is completely full and photos is not syncing anymore).

While the setting is turned on, I disabled wifi to make some random checks but many videos were not playing and a warning message like "some failure with downloading a better quality for this video from icloud occurred".

Does anyone have any experiences or tips to share how to get everything down save without losing any memories?

I read that it could be an option to upgrade to 2TB for a month, let everything sync and then download and then cancel/delete/downgrade my plan, but I think that may take forever to sync (~700GB total library, which surprisingly is shown on my Mac, but still some photos & videos seem to be missing/not fully downloaded)

Any help is much appreciated, thanks!

I use Thunderbird to access my iCloud mail on my Windows desktop. When I right click my iCloud account and click "Subscribe" to view the folders on the server, it shows a "Notes" folder. When I check it and sync mail, the folder is empty. But, this folder does not exist in my email on icloud.com or in my mail.app in iOS or macOS. What is this folder? It doesn't show the Notes that are in my notes.app. Was it added by thunderbird maybe? Has any other Thunderbird user noticed this?

This has been discussed here, but not in the past three years from what I’ve found. I’ve been paying $120/year for 2TB backup capacity with iCloud. I’ve never used more than 500GB. The downgrades that are available include 200GB @ $2.99/month, 50GB @ $0.99/month, or 5GB for free. It’s such a huge jump from 200GB to 2TB and I just can’t afford to pay so much anymore.

My iPhone 7 Plus got like 2GB of photos and videos, I turned off the iCloud Photos, downloaded all original photos and videos to album, and turn on the Camera Roll toogle in the iCloud backup to back up my whole phone, at the end the backup size was only less than 500MB.

After that I reset the phone and restored from iCloud backup, and then I opened the album and it was showing “downloading”.

The iCloud backup just skipped the Camera Roll and downloaded the photos and videos from iCloud Photos when it’s already off, please advise me what to do to completely move them to iCloud backup?

Hi,

Is there any way to get icloud drive working on Windows? I can't sync files, it keeps getting stuck on initializing.

I've tried installing an older version and then installing the version from the Microsoft Store, but still nothing.

I've also deleted all files from icloud and still nothing.

Or are there problems with syncing and would it be better to rely on Google Drive?

Thanks for your help