iCloud

Rich got an email from a viewer who lost all her precious pictures from the birth of her daughter because she didn't realize her iCloud account had reached its limits. So none of them were saved in the Cloud. When she swapped to a new phone, she lost all the images that were saved on her own phone. Is there a chance she can recover them? Rich says probably not. If you wiped the phone, there really isn't a way to get them back unless you have them backed up properly. And over-relying on iCloud could be a problem.

Tony says that Apple has killed third party reminders on iCloud with iOS 13.2. Rich says that Apple has locked down a lot of things on iOS 13, and third party reminders is one of them. It's a security issue. 

Larry has an old 2015 MacBook Pro with a 256GB SSD. It's not enough for his Raw Photo storage. Should he get an external hard drive or replace the internal one? Or maybe get a RAID? Leo says it's not that hard to replace the SSD in that 2015 MacBook pro. It's just a few screws, and MacSales.com has videos showing you how to do it. Getting an external may be OK, but it's not Thunderbolt 3, so it won't be as fast as internal. Leo also recommends learning about 3-2-1 backup from DPBestFlow.org. Leo also recommends backing up the photos online. Google Photos is a great place to do that.

George's wife updated her iPhone to iOS 13.2 and it's crashed. Verizon put a new SIM card. The Apple Store did a DFU reset and when they went to restore apps from iCloud, many of the apps don't install. Leo says that it's not uncommon for sync to stall. Try turning the phone off, wait a few minutes and then restart it. Then repeat the sync. 

After upgrading his iPhone 6S+ and his son's iPhone 7 to 13.1.2, Rich's phones began to get a bunch of old email notifications from Apple's mail application. Leo thinks it could be something within his iCloud client that's causing his phone to popup old email notifications, so it's best to check there. It is also possible that during the update to 13.1.2, the update could have done something to the iCloud application on Rich's phones. Unfortunately, when these issues occur with the app on the phone, it can be reflected in the iCloud client.

Octavio wants to make a switch to iOS, but he wants to know how he can do backup while on the road and not use iTunes? He wants to also backup his Windows machine with the same option. Leo says that if you want a "trust no one cloud backup" then there really isn't going to be a solution. But a local backup is your best bet for that, and that means a NAS (network-attached storage). Leo likes Synology. It'll backup every machine, except Octavio's iPad. Your only option there is to iCloud directly or through iTunes.

James has a large family that records many videos, and he's run out of storage in the cloud. He can't buy anymore iCloud to store everyone's movies and music. Leo says that James has transitioned to the enterprise-grade needs. Especially for backups. Leo says maybe just creating a duplicate Synology NAS off site and have it Sync. That way he can have as much storage he needs, rather than paying for it in the Cloud. It's also far more practical, since it won't take up bandwidth. Carbonite will even send a hard drive to back up and ship to them for storage. But that isn't readily available.

Tony has used up 4.9GB of his iCloud storage and he doesn't know how he's used all that. Leo says it's likely his phone backup. He can go to iCloud.com and login and see what's there. Chances are, if it isn't a phone backup, then it's likely all of his photos, which get automatically uploaded to the cloud. But he's wondering why it saves all his text messages and deleted email. Leo says he can probably change the mail settings to use less space. He should look in his email settings and choose things like "don't save attachments", etc.

Bruce wants to know why he's being asked for his iCloud password all the time on his iPhone 8. Leo isn't sure why this happens, but it's happened to him as well. It does go away eventually. Leo thinks it's just a bug. Leo suggests going into settings, and re-entering his passwords there.

Roy uses Google Drive and DropBox, but he's having issues with syncing folders to his other services. Leo says to check which folders are synced in the settings. He can also look at a third party service like ODrive. It will do all the syncing and will even merge all of his backup options except for Apple iCloud. He can also use a network attached storage device, which will also have a sync utility.