The 200GB is shared between everyone on the family sharing plan. Did your wife set up family sharing and invite your account? If not, that needs to be done, then the 200GB will show up on your device. I would get this set up first so you see the extra 200GB, then cancel your 50GB plan. That way you know you are covered by a storage plan and not trying to rush to set something up before 30 days expire.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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She is sharing it with me properly, but apparently my own 50GB plan (which I have had longer) is overriding her share with me?
If anything I would expect it to show as 250GB for you. At one point my wife had signed up for the 200GB family plan but still had an active 200GB personal plan that she shared as well, so it showed as 400GB available.
https://osxdaily.com/2021/07/29/how-share-icloud-storage-family-iphone-ipad/
For some reason it doesn’t. Also, our kids are still on my 50GB plan I initially shared with them, but would be able to switch over to my wife‘s plan now. I just don’t know, whether their data (especially photos) would seamlessly transfer over?
Looks like my wife didn’t have the sharing checkbox for iCloud storage selected — which is distinct from the Apple One Abonnement which includes the storage. Oh well, looks fine now. And the data didn’t get lost.
Glad its all sorted out now!
That is strange that you’re not already getting the benefit of being on the family plan. Try this maybe
Settings > iCloud account (at the top) > iCloud > Manage account storage > change storage plan
If you do that it will either give you the option to up your data and it should be “free” for the higher tier iirc or it will say that you’re on the family plan.
Also I believe the 200gb is shared, so keep that in mind if your wife is already using a lot of data.
For a person that isn’t the head of the family (in Apple’s eyes), they can either be in the family iCloud storage plan, or subscribe to their own plan and not be a part of the family’s storage. If the family wanted 250GB of storage, then the head of the family could add on a 50GB iCloud plan to their Apple One.
Right, I can see how someone would not want to used the shared storage. Should give him the option to switch to the shared storage though. It has been a long time since we set this up for ourselves.
It’s all automatic in our experience. No need to do any switching. As long as the head of the family has shared storage with the family member, once they cancel their personal plan, the stuff stored on their drive will count against the family’s limit.
As soon as your 50GB plan cancels your iCloud will go to “read-only” and won’t sync until you have enough storage.
After canceling you can go to settings, family sharing, and then enable your spouse’s iCloud+ plan and your iCloud should start syncing again.
I would recommend making a backup of everything on an external drive of course. There is never any guarantee that apple won’t lose data but I did this process a month ago and it was completely seamless.
Hearing that you made this step successfully gives me hope. But yeah, I’ll run the iCloud downloader first to have local backups.
Back up your data first, obviously. Then it’s irrelevant as to how it works.
Checked Apple forums, you're right. It's 200GBs shared
Not sure I understand your response?
Use the Apple Support app to ask them directly.
Sounds like a plan 😁 They are closed for today already, but I’ll try that tomorrow.
Support confirmed that when you stop a plan, the data is still kept in read only for 30 days. When you start a new storage plan in that timeframe, the data will be part of that new plan and not be lost.