I have no idea why I was given iCloud in the first place. I am now told by email from someone somewhere that it is about to run out as I am over an arbitrary limit. What is going to run out? What am I about to lose? How do I decide what to keep? Where is it; how do I know what it is and whether I want to keep it?
You apparently once had a MobileMe account. When that closed you migrated to iCloud which replaced some of its facilities, principally syncing (not the iDisk, which terminated).
iCloud has a free storage level of 5GB for emails, calendars, contacts etc. As a concession to MobileMe subscribers you were given an additional storage level (normally paid for) and this terminates tomorrow.
If you have less than 5GB in iCloud and do nothing you will downgrade to 5GB but will notice nothing. If you have more than 5GB you can pay to continue your storage (Lion or Mountain Lion or iOS5/6 required).
If you wish to continue your current storage level, the instructions are here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5527
Scroll down to 'How do I purchase my current plan?' and expand the section applicable to your computer or device.
If you would like to know more about iCloud please see this page:
Thanks Roger
However, I am afraid that this does not really help me. I don't think I need extra space but I have no idea what is up there anyway and I am worried that if I don't reduce "it" (whatever that is) I will lose stuff that I need. For instance, I store emails, photos and work fiiles over a period of years on my mac book air. The emails are also available on my ipad and on my iphone, but I don't think the files are. Does this new message from icloud mean I will lose an arbitrary number of items for ever? I regularly back up my data on to a hard drive but I don't think that includes my emails, or at least I can't find them if it does
Yours still confused
Alan
Your iCloud emails are stored on the the iCloud server and read from there by your Mac - that would be @me.com, possibly @mac.com and @icloud.com emails. No other email services are affected.
Have you been using iCloud? - you would have had to sign in in System Preferences>iCloud and checked Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Documents etc. there. Documents affects only iWork and TextEdit documents and you would know if you were saving them to iCloud. (Lion or Mountain Lion is required for this - the preference pane does not appear on earlier systems.)
System Preferences>iCloud will tell you what amount of storage you are using. As you know little about iCloud I doubt you have been using it much; possibly only for email. To check whether your calendars and contacts are syncing you could sign into http://icloud.com and see whether they are up to date there.
the iCloud mystery
