What do I really need icloud for, please? Why am I paying this fee? How can I stop it? What are the ramifications of stopping it? I have google drive, dropbox and onedrive, and I don't see the benefit of icloud.
Will I lose "Find my iPhone?" What exactly will I lose if I can indeed stop iCloud from banging my credit card every month?
Mac Pro
You can stop the fee by downgrading your iCloud Storage to free 5GB, but you will lose any files that exceed that. FindMyPhone is not affected.
iCloud will store iOS backups and restore them. iCloud offers a COMPLETE backup of your files, not only photos videos, contacts and calendar contrary to other backup services. iCloud will restore your iOS the way it was before including application data all in ONE operation. Restoring from iCloud will result in a complete restore of all the apps present on the device at the time to the backup. You don't want to have to remember which apps were on the device and download them again manually, one by one.
Apple offers 5 GB of free space to anyone with an AppleID. The $ .99 you're paying now gives you more space only, not better or more options. At one dollar a month it's a real bargain. So, no, you will not lose Find my iPhone or any other sync service like Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, etc, as long as they are active in your iCloud settings.
I doubt Google Drive oneDrive or DropBox for all their qualities offer phone support in case of trouble.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207428
The $.99 charge gives you 50GB of iCloud Storage space. Ramifications, are you will no longer get the 50GB of storage space.
iCloud is used for many things including iOS backups and photo storage if you use iCloud backups on an iPhone or iPad and iCloud Photo Library on Macs, iPhones etc..
If you cancel it, anything that exceeds the free 5GB option will be deleted from iCloud. Though the data should be preserved on your devices.
On your Mac, you can go to System Preferences->iCloud and see what is using it before cancelling it.
See here for detais: iCloud: What is iCloud?
Simply downgrade your storage to the free 5 GB AFTER making sure you don't have anything there that you need (or back it up). Instead of using iCloud, you could also get an external drive and put a Time Machine backup on it (or make an external bootable clone).
iCloud is primarily a syncing machine. It synchronizes multiple types of data across multiple types of machines. So it synchronizes additions and deletions like it's supposed to. If you accidentally) delete something important (like a contact) there is a way to restore it from your account on icloud.com
iCloud backups are a different kind of beast. iCloud backups take a picture of your device so it can be RESTORED in case of accident or migration to another device. It is a good thing. It was never marketed as an incremental backup.
You can keep a whole series of backups on your computer through iTunes. Once a backup is complete you can lock it down so that the next backup will start anew. This will fill up your startup drive rather quickly but it is easy to the files to another volume. If you have a Mac and use TimeMachine (it keeps historical backups) you can access old backups and restore a single file lost months ago.
Just use the free version of iCloud. iCloud provides a lot of things but most importantly to me is it provides syncing of data between devices.
iCloud is not considered an archival backup. It simply mirrors what is on your device, so if you delete something, it will automatically also be deleted from iCloud. I would never consider using it as a true backup.
iCloud is primarily a syncing machine
Well put. Personally, I have no idea why everyone appears to call it a backup.
I doubt Google Drive oneDrive or DropBox for all their qualities offer phone support in case of trouble.
Apple does offer phone support; however, if you are past your initial 90 days or did not purchase Applecare, that phone support will not be free. And, personally, I would not associate the word quality with anything Google, at least not anyone that makes their money by selling your information.
Many including myself would not consider iCloud or any other online synchronization scheme a suitable backup.
$.99 per month for icloud seems a waste
