This site started in a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, in November 2018. Our team of four—two sysadmins, a UX designer, and a freelance writer—had just spent a weekend migrating a client’s 12-person remote team from iCloud to Google Drive. The migration revealed a frustrating truth: Apple’s advertised sync speeds for shared folders and iCloud Drive were consistently 40-60% slower than what we measured with a stopwatch and a network monitor. That weekend, we realized that every “best cloud storage” list online relied on spec sheets, not real behavior. We built iCloud to fix that—by running our own timed uploads, multi-device sync tests, and file versioning drills on iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive, then publishing the actual numbers.
We focus on the practical workflow of remote workers aged 25-45: backing up a laptop while editing a shared spreadsheet, or syncing a 2GB video file across a MacBook, an iPhone, and a Windows PC. Every month, we run a standardized battery of 18 tests on fresh accounts, using consumer-tier internet (200 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up) on both macOS and Windows. We measure how long it takes for a 500MB folder of mixed .pdf, .psd, and .dng files to appear on a second device after the first upload finishes. We track how often iCloud pauses syncing when the MacBook lid is closed. We log the exact second a Photos library backup stalls because of a 5MB PNG file. These tests are the core of every review we publish, and we re-run them quarterly to catch changes in Apple’s server-side behavior.
We are a small team—three part-time contributors now, all still remote workers who use iCloud daily for their own backups. We do not accept sponsored placement or paid reviews. Our server costs and test account subscriptions are funded by a combination of Patreon supporters (about 180 members) and a single, non-invasive ad slot for a VPN provider we actually use. Every test result page includes a timestamp and a link to the raw spreadsheet we filled out during the test. If a service changes its sync behavior after an OS update, we flag it within 48 hours. In 2022, we caught iCloud’s “Optimize Storage” feature silently deleting local copies of files older than 90 days without warning—a bug Apple confirmed and patched two months later. That kind of detail is why readers tell us they check our site before committing to a backup plan for their team.
We publish one deep-dive comparison per month, alternating between iCloud vs. Dropbox (for team folder sync) and iCloud vs. OneDrive (for Windows-heavy setups). Each comparison includes a one-paragraph verdict written for a busy project manager: “If your team uses Mac-only hardware and needs zero-touch backup, iCloud wins. If you share files with contractors on Windows, skip iCloud and use Dropbox.” We also maintain a live “Sync Speed Index” updated weekly from user-submitted test data—currently showing iCloud’s average upload speed at 8.2 MB/s versus Dropbox’s 11.7 MB/s on the same connection. For questions about specific workflows or hardware, visit our Contact Us page. We read every message, and if you send us a test result for a service we haven’t covered, we’ll run our full battery on it within two weeks.