AppleInsider Staff
In an email sent out by Apple on Thursday, former MobileMe members were notified that their free iCloud storage would expire at the end of September, bumping them down to the usual 5GB allotted to new users.
According to Apple's email, upgraded accounts, and their associated free storage allotments, will expire on Sept. 30, 2013, nearly two years after iCloud was released to the public in 2011.
When Apple introduced iCloud, the service gave users 5GB of free storage for photos, phone data, and other items. As a nod to former MobileMe members who were subscribed to tiered cloud data plans, Apple offered free cloud storage at their then-current tier levels for one year. The gratis storage was originally set to expire in September 2012, but Apple extended the period by one year.
In addition to the expiration date, Apple provided users with the amount of space they currently use on iCloud, allowing them time to move data off the service before the data cap is installed. It is unclear what will happen to those users who ignore the letter, though it is unlikely that Apple would erase stored data without first sending a letter of warning.
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Mike Wuerthele
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
35 Comments
A tip for those who might have difficulty in finding how to prevent the auto-downgrade. You are looking for the button "Downgrade Options...". In here it will be set to the 5GB level, just simply switch it to the appropriate level you want and it will automatically charge your card on file for that amount. Just wish we could charge it now or at our own set time.
The positive: The grace period was more than generous and Apple handled that perfectly well. Fully legitimate to ask for payments now. The negative: It now becomes pretty obvious how limited the design of iCloud really is. As you can't even access the storage space used by most apps, you just can't copy or move files in the Finder to some other location. You have to go into every single app and use whatever means available to mail, export or delete the data. There is also no way to influence the backup space consumed by iDevice backups (e.g. my iPad backups seem to include gigabytes of newspaper and magazine data that I could download freely from the original sources anyhow).
5GB backup storage needs to be reconsidered. It is just not enough if you have more than one device. I have one iPhone, one iPad mini, and 2 iPads and I already use 7GB. My sons iPod touch (32GB) is already over the 5GB and cannot backup without deleting things from the camera roll. It should be 5GB PER DEVICE.
That headline seems like an elegantly polite way of saying:
MobileMe users about to get mugged.
5GB backup storage needs to be reconsidered. It is just not enough if you have more than one device. I have one iPhone, one iPad mini, and 2 iPads and I already use 7GB. My sons iPod touch (32GB) is already over the 5GB and cannot backup without deleting things from the camera roll.
It should be 5GB PER DEVICE.
yes 5gB per device. My wife has an iPhone, numerous IOS and two macs linked - i also only get the same.
Also the icloud storage is no where near useful as MobileMe.