iCloud

Jim's wife has a 32GB iPhone and she keeps running out of space because iCloud keeps downloading the pictures back to her phone. Leo says to look in the Photo settings. Make sure that the "optimize phone storage" feature is enabled. It will keep the full rez photos in the cloud, and a lower rez version on your phone. The other option is to turn off automatic sync to iCloud. That will prevent iCloud from putting them back on the phone and once the user deletes them, they will stay deleted. Then use Google Photos to save photos to the cloud and delete them off the phone.

Sharon has an iPhone XR with a mess of reminders in it, along with notes. But when she updated the phone, her lists all disappeared. Leo says that there are a whole bunch of lists in reminders. So Sharon may have overlooked them. If they are missing, they might be on iCloud. How can she find them? She has no idea. Leo says to go to iCloud.com and log in with your Apple ID. You can find that info in your phone settings. Once you log in, you can snoop around until you find it. It may be in notes.

Tom wants to know what Apple has done with the iPhone 11 camera. He's having issues with editing the software. Leo says that's likely because Apple has adopted the HEIC image codec, which is a new standard that not every program supports. He can change the format in camera settings, but he can also export it as RAW or JPG when sharing.  Leo says that Apple saves full-res versions on iCloud, while caching lower-res versions on the iPhone. So when users open it in the photo editor, they have to wait for the phone to download the full-res version before the app can open it.

Terry edits 4K video with his iPhone 11 Pro Max. But when he makes changes, the upload to his iMac is very slow. Leo says that no online backup is going to use all the bandwidth you have to backup. And your upload speed is always drastically lower than your download speed. Leo says that Apple does offer iCloud backup on your mobile phone, but it's only 5GB for free, and the data isn't private.  You can buy extra bandwidth, however. Leo recommends also backing up directly to your Mac. 

George has a Seagate external hard drive for storing his photos. But when he opens it, he sees everything from photos to files. Leo says it's likely that his Mac is using Time Machine, and it's backing up everything. You have the option to disable the backing of system files and other data. So spend some time in the settings and decide what you want to backup. Once you tell Time Machine what drive you want for backup, then it'll backup regularly. Leo also recommends enabling 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.