Question on Manage Storage behavior when iCloud is full

[nquinn]

Does anyone know the exact behavior of manage storage when your iCloud capacity is exceeded?

The issue: Mom takes a ton of photos and has only a 64gb iPhone. We're deciding how much storage to buy in a new macbook (256gb vs 512gb) and if we can avoid the $10/mo 2tb plan.

For sake of this conversation, let's say that she is about to exceed 200gb, so the $3 icloud plan won't be sufficient.

So, imagine:

- 64gb iPhone with manage storage on, constantly taking photos with a $1 or $3 per month iCloud plan (50-200gb)
- 512gb macbook because I'd like to keep at one true local copy of photos, not just trusting iCloud

Let's say her iCloud is now maxed out and she takes more photos. Will iCloud be smart enough to still sync new photos over to the 512gb macbook? Or would they completely fail to sync at this point because iCloud is full (assuming this is the case).

In short I'm just sort of being cheap and really don't want to pay $10/mo for iCloud just because she might need 250gb of storage and nowhere near 2tb. $2.50/month for 500gb of storage from B2, for example, would be so much more cost efficient but obviously don't sync from phone->macbook.

Open to better or more interesting solutions as well.

 

[saudor]

from my experience, icloud gets particularly nasty when either the device or the storage space online gets full.
That being said, iCloud will not sync new photos to your other devices since it's full aka wont accept any new ones (unless they changed it recently but i doubt it since it defeats the purpose of a storage limit)

Ive also had friends losing massive amounts of data when they toggle icloud on and off when the device gets full (some files get orphaned and then cleared during the toggle). This is where stuff that didnt make it into icloud start disappearing. In your case, you could potentially trigger this when the iphone 64gb is full and the icloud is toggled on and off. Again, they might have improved this behaviour in later iOS versions but i dont trust apple when it comes to this.


Of course i've also had issues where icloud just gobbles up 80gb bandwidth a day forever syncing the same file that's only a few hundred MB in size.


For this reason, i highly recommend leaving iCloud out of the equation on your macbook and just import everything the "old way". That way, no matter what happens on your phone/icloud, at least you have a copy of your photos on your macbook that wont follow along with any potential screw ups iCloud does.

Again, YMMV and this approach does add an extra roadblock in what could have been a more seamless experience.

 

[nquinn]

Ugh, ya, I've been doing things manually as well.

The headache with that is if you want to leave some photos on your phone, when importing the next time around you have to manage duplicates in some way.

 

[saudor]

Ugh, ya, I've been doing things manually as well.

The headache with that is if you want to leave some photos on your phone, when importing the next time around you have to manage duplicates in some way.

The app actually handles it and files it under "Already imported". I vaguely remember even a button that allows you to import new photos only

 

[nquinn]

The app actually handles it and files it under "Already imported". I vaguely remember even a button that allows you to import new photos only

I'll consider it but wouldn't trust it. Windows 10 at least failed miserably for me in the past when I tried to tell it to skip already imported/etc.

Like, what is it comparing to? File hashes in the same location I imported last time? Hashes stored in a database that I imported the file once in the past, but might have deleted it and want it again?

Just a messy process