But what on earth can I use this storage for?

So really, they can offer us 55GB of space for a year, which seems a very generous offer given that they are not charging well over £100 as I used to pay for my maxed out iDisk. But there's probably not a single user who is going to fill 55GB with the kind of documents that can be stored there. Only photographs could fill that space; and even then it would take a massive amount of those to use up 55GB.

And having found every last word processing document and photograph I can lay my hands on to fill the space, would it be worth it if I knew that at the end of the year I'd have to remove it all and back it all up somewhere else?

One wonders why they bothered! It is no replacement for my iDisk. Now if we have a flood or a fire, I've lost the lot, no matter how much backing up I've done. Unless I turn to DropBox, that is. Maybe I will. What Apple has done is handed me a huge trunk and told me I can keep only unboxed cufflinks and earrings in it for a year, while I'm desperately looking around for somewhere to put my boots!

Thanks for the comments, guys. I think you'll agree with me that this is a statement of bewildered disbelief rather than a problem and that there's no solution unless Apple changes the way iCloud works.

Well, yes, I could choose one. But there is another consideration. I chose to invest in an iDisk because I trust Apple's security. While the rest of the world is riddled with viruses, worms and security breaches, we are mercifully almost free from such things. And the fact that it was so clunky and slow somehow made me believe in it's security more than I do with iCloud. Nobody in their right mind would try and breach an iDisk account because they'd have to spend such a long time downloading anything! iCloud is so instant it feels too easy, so I'm very wary of putting anything that could be used by an identity thief up there. Am I just being paranoid or does anyone else share my misgivings about such ease and speed?