iCloud Drive Transition by Tim Brown

For those of you who own Apple devices and computers, you most likely have iCloud. iCloud stores files you use on a regular basis like photos, music, calendars, books, apps, so that you can stay connected to your content across devices. Recently, Apple also included other services like iMovie Theater, located inside the iMovie app, which enables you to store video files in the cloud, and iWork for iCloud, which gives you access to Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. 

iCloud Drive
During WWDC, Apple introduced iCloud Drive, a greatly expanded cloud service that now stores files from just about every application on your Mac or iOS device. The most notable addition to this service is the inclusion of video files. If you agree to subscribe to the new iCloud Drive service during the installation of iOS 8, you will notice in settings that this service is currently in Beta. Tech bloggers made note of this right away, quickly alerting Apple users to avoid switching to iCloud Drive. As a service currently in beta, the warnings were warranted, mainly because iCloud Drive is not an extension of your previously iCloud service but a replacement. As a result, you will encounter some consistencies regarding files you can access from you Mac as opposed to your iPhone or iPad. In some cases, you may notice inconsistencies between devices as well.

Yosemite and iOS 8
The significance of having the new iCloud Drive service is to improve synchronization across your Mac and iOS devices. Unfortunately, iCloud Drive was released in a beta version, largely because the service was ONLY available to iOS devices, not the Mac. If, for example, you chose to upgrade to iCloud Drive, you simultaneously initiated a process that disabled access to iCloud projects, like keynote presentations from your Mac. For example, upon launching Keynote on my Mac, I received the following pop-up: Sorry iCloud Drive is not compatible with OS X Mavericks. Of course, I received the same error message on my Mac when I tried to access iMovie Theater projects in the cloud. 

Problems, but not really
I discovered some problems with the transition from iCloud to iCloud drive. For example, I began to notice that I could access Keynote presentations from my iPhone 5S, but I could not access them from my iPad 3. This did not seem to have anything to due with the devices, but more with a delay in the transmission or transfer process. I also experienced the same problem with iMovie. I saved several projects and videos to the new iCloud Drive service using my iPhone, but I could not access them from my iPad. It took a week before I would find parity across devices. 

In summary, the transition to iCloud Drive will include some growing pains. The process of transitioning from iCloud to iCloud Drive will not be complete until users are able to download Yosemite for the Mac. If you are not a Mac user, the process will just require a little bit of patience. If you are still in a panic, you can alleviate your fears by going to www.icloud.com.