I don't feel that iCloud is all it's cracked up to be. Case in point: my buddy just asked me to do file recovery (which was unsuccessful) on his iPhone 4S. The story: He saw an update available (iOS 8), downloaded & installed it, and halfway through the installation, it had a fatal error & crashed. It started back up again, but said that it had to be setup as a new phone since it crashed during the upgrade. Long story short, it lost all his stuff - contacts, photos, everything. iCloud had nothing for him, which turned the story from bad to worse.
He is not a technical user - all he did was see an update & run it. He doesn't plug it in on a regular basis to back it up to iTunes (and iTunes has its own set of backup glitches...the last two backup/restores I've done have had issues like not restoring the Apps & so on). He had iCloud setup under his email address when he originally bought the 4S back in like 2011, but nothing was synced up there, so he had no idea even his last 1,000 photos weren't being backed up to PhotoStream or anything, regardless of his free 5GB iCloud account.
Needless to say, he is extremely frustrated. He doesn't want to switch to Android, but he lost a couple thousand photos, ALL of his contacts, etc. There was no alert on his phone telling him things weren't syncing to iCloud or reminding him to do a backup. He thought everything was fine until the upgrade install borked & forced him to do a fresh install, and again, he's not technical enough to know that he should have done a full phone backup to iTunes on his PC before doing a major system update...after all, it's an Apple phone...plug it into the wall, hop onto Wifi, and push the update button. Should be easy!
I think there should be 2 changes:
1. A clear status indicator on the phone regarding iCloud sync, including a dashboard for checking what you have (x number of photos, y number of contacts, etc.)
2. A better-defined product page for iCloud that explains what it actually does
As far as he knew, his iCloud was working fine, until he hit a hiccup & lost everything. So now we have PhotoStream, iCloud, etc. I'm still trying to get my head around the differences between "My Photo Stream", "iCloud Photo Sharing", "Camera Roll", etc. because it's just not clear. Plus the Photos app is garbage now because there's no way to scroll through a list of ALL of your photos - the Albums switched to "Recently added", which only shows the last 30 days or whatever, and now you've only got the crappy "Collections" and "Moments" view. Some more info on iCloud & photos here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4858
http://help.apple.com/icloud/
This is really confusing to me. In iOS 8, I cannot simply open my Photos app and see ALL of my photos. All I really wanted Apple to do was make it so the Camera roll had a speed-scroll bar on the right side so that I could hop through all of the photos easily, but instead, they've made it more complicated. I have no idea what is even backing up to PhotoStream or iCloud because on iOS 7, I constantly got the "not enough space" issue every night from iCloud as an alert, even when I'd have less than 5 gigs of photos & not have any other programs synced to iCloud for data backup.
Anyway, it's just not clear, and I have no easy way to tell exactly what I'm backing up. I play it safe & do my own photo backups on a weekly basis to my desktop computer because I don't trust Apple's system, partially because I don't fully understand how it works. I also don't know how the pay-for iCloud service works...if you have a 16GB iPhone and take 150 gigs of photos, does it automatically back those up to your $4-a-month iCloud service & delete the oldest ones? Basically, I don't feel that this is very clear at all, and I don't know how to easily verify that all of my stuff is actually being backed up. I'll stick with DiskAid for now since I've been burnt by iTunes backups several times as well.
He is not a technical user - all he did was see an update & run it. He doesn't plug it in on a regular basis to back it up to iTunes (and iTunes has its own set of backup glitches...the last two backup/restores I've done have had issues like not restoring the Apps & so on). He had iCloud setup under his email address when he originally bought the 4S back in like 2011, but nothing was synced up there, so he had no idea even his last 1,000 photos weren't being backed up to PhotoStream or anything, regardless of his free 5GB iCloud account.
Needless to say, he is extremely frustrated. He doesn't want to switch to Android, but he lost a couple thousand photos, ALL of his contacts, etc. There was no alert on his phone telling him things weren't syncing to iCloud or reminding him to do a backup. He thought everything was fine until the upgrade install borked & forced him to do a fresh install, and again, he's not technical enough to know that he should have done a full phone backup to iTunes on his PC before doing a major system update...after all, it's an Apple phone...plug it into the wall, hop onto Wifi, and push the update button. Should be easy!
I think there should be 2 changes:
1. A clear status indicator on the phone regarding iCloud sync, including a dashboard for checking what you have (x number of photos, y number of contacts, etc.)
2. A better-defined product page for iCloud that explains what it actually does
As far as he knew, his iCloud was working fine, until he hit a hiccup & lost everything. So now we have PhotoStream, iCloud, etc. I'm still trying to get my head around the differences between "My Photo Stream", "iCloud Photo Sharing", "Camera Roll", etc. because it's just not clear. Plus the Photos app is garbage now because there's no way to scroll through a list of ALL of your photos - the Albums switched to "Recently added", which only shows the last 30 days or whatever, and now you've only got the crappy "Collections" and "Moments" view. Some more info on iCloud & photos here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4858
http://help.apple.com/icloud/
This is really confusing to me. In iOS 8, I cannot simply open my Photos app and see ALL of my photos. All I really wanted Apple to do was make it so the Camera roll had a speed-scroll bar on the right side so that I could hop through all of the photos easily, but instead, they've made it more complicated. I have no idea what is even backing up to PhotoStream or iCloud because on iOS 7, I constantly got the "not enough space" issue every night from iCloud as an alert, even when I'd have less than 5 gigs of photos & not have any other programs synced to iCloud for data backup.
Anyway, it's just not clear, and I have no easy way to tell exactly what I'm backing up. I play it safe & do my own photo backups on a weekly basis to my desktop computer because I don't trust Apple's system, partially because I don't fully understand how it works. I also don't know how the pay-for iCloud service works...if you have a 16GB iPhone and take 150 gigs of photos, does it automatically back those up to your $4-a-month iCloud service & delete the oldest ones? Basically, I don't feel that this is very clear at all, and I don't know how to easily verify that all of my stuff is actually being backed up. I'll stick with DiskAid for now since I've been burnt by iTunes backups several times as well.