iCloud

It's not unusual these days for some popular Internet service to experience an outage. Many of the big ones last a few hours at most. The most recent that drove the Internet nuts was YouTube, which went back up in around an hour. Unless your livelihood depends on YouTube, however, that may have not had much practical impact. When some of Apple's iCloud services like Documents, Backup, and even Sign-in go down for almost half a day, however, you can be forgiven if you find it odd there wasn't much uproar over it.

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Apple doesn't really offer any free trials for its iCloud services, but it seems a rare promotion is being offered ahead of this year's new iPhone models. New and existing iPhone users can get two months of iCloud's 200GB of storage for free, which is a hefty amount of space but not for very much time. The promotion is only available in the US, unfortunately, as it requires users subscribe to one of the four big carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint).

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Apple would really like you to start paying it for iCloud, and it's rolling out a new promo to encourage users to get a taste for a bigger chunk of online storage. The new promotion applies to users who are currently taking advantage of the free iCloud storage tier, in an attempt to coax them into making more use of the paid services.

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Your iCloud data may in fact be living on Google servers, Apple has quietly confirmed, as new security documentation details exactly what part of the cloud the iOS and macOS uses for its remote storage. Apple's iCloud service launched in late 2011, as the company's remote storage option for documents, photos, and more.

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Apple has quietly brought back one of its most eagerly-anticipated - and sorely missed - messaging features in the iOS 11.3 beta 1, which has been released for developers today. Messages in iCloud had been part of the original iOS 11 release back in mid-2017, promising to not only synchronize all of your conversations more effectively across any device signed into the same Apple ID, but also save space in the process.

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Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away. One of the most compelling features for iPhone users has been unexpectedly removed in the latest beta version of iOS, with Messages in iCloud being axed - at least for the moment. The surprise removal occurred with the release of iOS 11 beta 5 today, with Apple yet to comment on why it disappeared.

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Computing devices are getting more powerful, more varied, and more ubiquitous, but the data storage in these devices hasn't changed that much. We are still beholden to the HDDs, SSDs, and eMMCs or UFS of yesteryears. In fact, the storage story has become even more complicated because each device has its own storage that you have to manage or keep in sync with other devices.

Enter cloud computing and cloud storage, with its promise of being able to access your data anytime, anywhere. Well, as long as you have an Internet connection, that is. It is an inescapable fact of modern day computing life and it pays to know the choices you have. Here are ten of the top cloud storage options this half of the year.

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Apple went into overdrive with the announcements it made yesterday during its WWDC 2017 keynote, but one small yet important change to iCloud wasn't given much attention. It seems that Apple has reconsidered its iCloud pricing, ultimately giving heavy iCloud users more storage for their money. This could very well ignite a cloud storage pricing war between iCloud and competitors like Google Drive at a pretty important moment.

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Amazon's Alexa now supports iCloud Calendar, allowing the virtual assistant to check your schedule on the Apple service. The update means that users of the Amazon Echo - as well as the Echo Dot and Amazon Tap - can get an instant read-out of what's on their agenda for the day, by asking "Alexa, what's on my calendar today?" There's also support for adding new appointments, again all by voice.

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Like many of Apple's apps and services, the Notes app can be synced to iCloud to make the information available on a number of devices. When a user chooses to delete a note, they can recover it within 30 days, but after that Apple states the data is wiped. However, security firm ElcomSoft has discovered that it's able to recover notes well beyond this 30-day window.

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Apple’s cloud-based calendar solution has finally caught up to modern times. Or at least modern e-mail times. Just as any e-mail service worth its salt has an option to flag an e-mail as spam, now the iCloud Calendar finally has such a button as well. At least iCloud on the web. And it only took a mass spamming incident and dozens of vocal Apple users before Apple finally got its act together to roll out such a feature, a bit more than a month after users have started making noise.

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If you haven’t yet experienced receiving unwanted even invitations, a.k.a. spam, on your iPhone or iPad’s Calendar app, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. iOS users have reported suddenly being plagued by numerous such invites on their devices, and declining them seems to make it actually worse. After days of silence, Apple has finally but unofficially acknowledge the situation and is promising to take action. But as spam filtering only happens on Apple’s end (for now), all that users can do is wait and use these workarounds to get rid of those notifications (for now).

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