What Happens When Your iCloud Storage Is Full?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what happens when your iCloud Storage is full. 

So a question I'm often asked is what happens when your iCloud Storage space is full. Everybody gets 5 gigs for free from Apple which is really handy for doing things like backing up your iPhone and also saving a modest number of photos in the Photos App.  You can also use this for storing files in iCloud Drive. But if you take a lot of photos or do any serious work with your Mac you're probably going to upgrade to a higher storage tier like 50 gigs, 200 gigs, 2 terabytes, that kind of thing. But regardless of how much space you're got there is still an upper limit. What happens when you get to it? Can you just not access your files? Do some of your files disappear? What is going on? To demonstrate I'm going to actually overload an iCloud account so you can see what happens.

Now I'm going to go into System Settings here and then I'm going to go down to iCloud. You can see what I've got here. I have the default 5 gig available here with this sample account. My real account has far more, of course. You can see it's mostly full. I'm using it for photo, obviously here, and some files in iCloud Drive as well as a few other things. If I want to see what is taking up the most space I can click the Manage button and it's going to calculate that. So I can see that iCloud Photos takes up the most. I've got some things in iCloud Drive. I've got some backups. I can look here for more information. So, for iCloud Photos I can click on this and I can see I've got 659 photos, two videos. For backup I can see I've got my iPhone backed up and that's how much space that is using there. Then I can see I'm also using a decent amount of space inside the Freeform Database for my Freeform boards. Then there's others here as well. A lot of these are used by my iPhone, not necessarily my Mac but it's still using the same iCloud space since it's the same it's the same Apple ID. So I can see here I'm pretty close to filling up. I'm 4/5ths full. So what happens if I actually fill it up? 

Let's move this off to the side here and let's bring up a New Finder Window. I've got my Documents folder here in iCloud Drive. What if I were to add more things to this? So, what I'm going to do here, is under other, I'm going to add some more files. I'm going to open up a second Finder Window and I'm going to go to my Home Folder, which is on my local drive. It's not part of my iCloud Drive. I've got some large files here. So what happens when I take those large files and I bring them into this folder, which is in iCloud Drive, from this folder which is not in iCloud Drive. 

So let's take, for instance, this sample text file here that's 300 megs size. I'm going to move it over from my local storage to iCloud Drive. This is going to take up more of this storage here. In fact if I look here in Manage, then right away I'm going to see iCloud Drive is using more space than it was before. You can see the iCloud Drive percentage has jumped to 19% of my total storage. But things are kind of slow to update. Notice that the total amount here has not updated yet. You can wait for that to update. I'm actually going to exit System Settings, go back into System Settings here, go back to iCloud Drive and it will update here. You can see 4.3 out of 5 gigs is now used. This meter is a little bit more to the right here. If I click manage you can see I've got less available there.

I'm going to take another file here. This Presentation file is pretty big and I'm going to also move that over. The I've got a pretty spreadsheet. I'm going to move that over as well. I can also update by, say, clicking away. Let's go, for instance, to Focus here. Then back to iCloud, then you'll see update. Now it is yellow. Notice I got the Notification that I'm getting close to filling up all my space. Here's another file, a video file. I'm going to move this over here as well. So now it's going to fill up even more. You can see it updated here. So we're getting really close. As a matter of fact this file should push it over. To do that let's not just drag this file over but I'm actually going to add that to my Photos Library, since it's a video here. So I'm going to add this to my iCloud Photos Library and it is going to import it in there. You can see here at the bottom of my library is it now syncing that one item to iCloud. Now that that's done you can see I get the notification here that iCloud Storage is full. I can see here, sync to iCloud. In Photos it ays storage is full. You a see now it's red, 5 gigs out of 5 gigs is used. It's Full.

I can go to Manage and I could see here that it's full. It's all in red. It's telling me what is using the most amount of space. Here in Finder, since I'm looking at an iCloud Drive folder, it tells me my storage is full.

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Let's try to add a new file. This modestly sized PDF here to this iCloud Drive folder. It shows that it is Done though it is still allowing me to upload some things. What if I try to put something much larger? You see again it allows me to put that in there. But you can see now I get the little Cloud Icon with an exclamation point showing that that file has not actually been uploaded to iCloud Drive. So I actually wouldn't see that file on other devices, or I may see it but not be able to actually access the file. So what's happening here is it is not letting me to upload new files, at least large ones, to iCloud Drive. But I could still access the file that I have there. For instance, this Example Numbers File is in iCloud Drive and you can see it is not actually local. If I double click this should download from iCloud Drive and open up. It will do that. So I can access existing files just fine. I can access the existing Photos just fine, even the ones that haven't be downloaded from iCloud Drive. It is just I can't add anything new. Anything new is just going to remain local and won't complete the upload, just like if I didn't have an internet connect at the moment. 

On this page, Apple actually spells out exactly what happens when your iCloud Drive Storage is full. It says right here, if you run out of iCloud Storage your device won't backup to iCloud. It's usually your iPhone doing the backing up. New photos and videos won't upload to iCloud Photos. So, you can add them to your Library but they'll just be local. They will not have completed the upload to iCloud so you won't see them on other devices. If you're using that as a kind of backup then you won't have that. iCloud Drive and other iCloud Apps won't stay up-to-date across your devices. So, you'll be able to create new documents, do things on your Mac, but those things will not complete syncing to iCloud. You won't see them on your other devices. They won't be saved there. You'll be in this state of everything being stuck locally and the syncing won't complete. Also, and very importantly, you won't be able to send or receive emails with your iCloud email Address. Your iCloud email uses the same storage. So basically your email will be stuck because storage is full.

You definitely don't want to leave this alone. You need to take care of it by either buying more storage or clearing more space. Those are the two options. So if you simply want to upgrade the amount of storage you've got that's relatively simple. Let's take a look at the upgrade options here. You can see you can go from 5 to 50 gigs a month for only a dollar a month. So twelve dollars a year. If you're worried about having to always add money to your Apple Account. So you could buy, say, twenty dollars for your Apple Account, and then your one dollar a month will come out of that. If you're hovering around the 5 gig limit and just need a little bit more then this twelve dollars a year gets you that plus plenty of extra leeway. 

If you need more you can go to four times that amount for three dollars a month or thirty-six dollars a year. The other thing you can do, of course, is to move things from iCloud Storage to Local Only Storage. So they won't be available anywhere else but on your Mac. Inside the iCloud System Settings here when you go to Manage it's easy to see what is taking up space. So you a form a plan. For instance, if you don't want all your photos in iCloud then you can remove some of them. You can go into Photos here and usually your largest files are always videos. See what your videos are and decide that to save space in iCloud Drive you just want to have photos in your Photos Library, not Videos. Often by getting rid of just a few videos you can have enough space for a years worth of photos. 

So you would go to the Finder here to your Home folder and in your Home folder here you can decide to create a new folder here to hold your personal videos or you can decide to put them in the movies folder that you already have there. Maybe create a new folder called My Videos inside the Movies Folder. Then in there you can export these by simply going to File, Export Unmodified Originals or the selected videos. You can select the original file name there. So use the file name that comes from the camera. Export those originals there and then these files will be local to your Mac Only.   So not in iCloud Drive. So once you've moved to these large videos here you can simply delete them from your Photos Library. So you can select them, press Delete to delete from the devices. Once you've done that it still takes three days for them to go away. So you want to go to Recently Deleted here and then use Delete All. That will clear them out right now and then give a few minutes, or in some cases a little longer, for the space to clear up in iCloud Drive. 

The other thing you can do is the same thing for Files. So, in the Finder go to iCloud Drive here and you see everything in iCloud Drive. If you look to the right you'll see under Size the size of each folder. You can use View and Show View Options or Command J and turn on Calculate all sizes to calculate the size of each folder. Then sort by Size. You want to be in List View to do that. Then you can see which folders have the most stuff in them. Then you could simply dig down into your to Folders, here, like that. Sort by Size here as well. See where the largest folders are there. Sort by Size here as well. Decide that maybe you don't need this file to be in iCloud Drive. You can bring it over into your Home Folder again, create a folder for yourself called Local Documents or something like that and move these large files into here. This will take them off of iCloud Drive and put them in Local Only, so only on your Mac. 

Another strategy is to have an external drive to hold files that you don't think you'll need to access on a regular basis. For instance I have a drive here called Archive. It is an external drive hooked up to my Mac. I can archive things and leave them behind, say, when I'm on the go and take my MacBook. So if I take all those files that I moved over there because I don't need them in iCloud Drive. I just put them back here in my local folder, take them out of iCloud Drive, it updates. It may take a little longer than that. That was pretty quick. But now when I go into System Settings you can see it is updated there. 

If on the other hand you just decide you're going to delete files, so you can take a file and delete it, remember after you delete it they sit in the Trash and are still around for awhile. You want to go to Finder, and then Empty Trash here to empty that out. 

As for other things to do when your iCloud Drive is full and you're unwilling to buy more space, just pay attention to the results you get here. Look at these different apps. Think about what you need and think about what you don't. Also, under Backups for your iPhone here you may notice that you've got an older iPhone. Maybe your previous iPhone that's backed up in addition to your current one. You can select it and hit the Minus Button there to delete it. 

So I hope you found this informative and useful. Thanks for watching.