How Apple’s iCloud Drive works — and how to use it

iCloud Drive is Apple’s essential connection between all your devices, Mac, iPhone, iPad, even your Windows PC.

While the cost of storage seems expensive in comparison to other online storage services, its advantage is that it works natively across all your devices.

You can use it to maintain access to all your documents and other items across your Apple devices, Macs, iPhones, and  iPads. It also works with Windows using an application. Better yet, it works to ensure all your items are up to date across all your devices.

You need to be running iOS 13 or later or macOS Catalina or later on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. A PC must run Windows 10 to access iCloud for Windows.

How iCloud Drive works

You can store documents, images and spreadsheets using iCloud Drive; you can also keep files and folders up-to-date across devices, work on them, and access these items from anywhere.

On iOS devices, you access your iCloud Drive through the Files app. Open Files and you’ll find iCloud Drive as a location. Changes applied to a copy of a file on one device will automatically sync across all your other systems.

This is a real file system, so you can create and save items to your own self-created folders, which is useful if you work across multiple devices. 

If you use iCloud Drive across multiple Macs then changes made to the Documents and Desktop files on both Macs will sync. The Mac you activate last will create its own folder for the contents of its Documents and Desktop, and this will also sync.