I make music mostly using GarageBand on an iPad Pro 2, sometimes Cubasis too. Anyone here will understand, as time goes by, the amount of data in terms of song files etc that you accumulate, expands massively. So we all end up needing some kind of extra large storage, not on our device usually. Like a big portable drive or a Cloud storage method. I cannot speak of other cloud storage, only iCloud.

Due to iCloud seemingly being determined and unstoppable in grabbing around a fifth or 20% of my SSD on the iPad Pro 2 I own, here are the ‘emergency steps’ I was forced to take, notes from my backup diary:

SD1 the SD card 1 out of 3
The folders FrSg5 and Frsg 10 thr 12 on this SD card, are THE ONLY COPIES.
The originals on ipad had to be deleted to make space.

SD2 the SD card 2 out of 3
The folder FrSg 24 thr 54 is the ONLY copy of all these songs.
The originals had to be deleted to make space.

…end of notes.

FYI the SD cards are at 130Mb/s write speed, and at a measured 82Mb/s (really megabits per second, I converted it from megabytes a minute, which is how I lap-timed it on my iphone to start with). This is actually pretty good, because I don’t think it slows down or throttles back, my lightning port max speed at all? USB1.1 (12Mb/s) does, badly.

USB2 at 480Mb/s really should not, but there must be some fibs told about SSD compact portable storage devices (like a cigarette packet size but half as thick), because the one I got, is like a fifth the speed of file transfer that my Sandisk Ultra 128Gb SD cards work at from iPad (via lightning port and the USB3 adapter Apple sell, that also has a lightning power input to keep charging while operating multiple USB items via a powered Hub).

FYI, the hub I use is a multi-port Anker, USB3, and it’s as fast as any I assume, they are a good make. It has extra ports that seem to be for heavy-current power via USB.

The problem I discovered with the iCloud system, is it will not accept manual movements of files onto it from your local device, without reacting pretty aggressively, in a manner it has clearly been set up to do deliberately ie that’s their algorithm I assume. If they get say 50Gb dropped on them, of GarageBand song files, they kick them right back to the local device storage you were trying to free up. That’s just fact. Try it, by all means, but you cannot clear this storage use back once it happens, so you will end up in the position I have ended up in.

I have called Apple Support. Their answer involves deleting all the files I sent to iCloud for safekeeping. Feel free to re-read that sentence!

The overall effect of the iCloud ‘reflexively’ spitting-back or mirroring a copy of files you try and manually create on your 2Tb iCloud space, is to make a local copy completely unusable to you, that takes up valuable and expensive SSD on your local iPad. Note, it also has had the practical effect of reducing me to using a single local copy of my important song fies, on a tiny little SD card! This, is insane, the opposite of a ‘safe or archived off-site copy’ which is what I thought iCloud would do for me.

The only exception to this is that if you should happen to want to use one of these older files, you manually copied to the iCloud for safekeeping, it will start up instantly, because the spit-back files are indeed your own files.

But that is a minority and unlikely use case for me. I doubt it is a likely use case for anyone.

Let’s revisit the over-arching effect - it is that pressure is placed on the user, to always buy more SSD in their next Apple purchase, because they find iCloud is next to useless, in terms of day-to-day exploitation of cloud space.

It is NOT a drive ‘D’.

It is NOT universally useful.

You can NOT manually move a folder or set of folders full of files, from your own local Apple device, onto iCloud without this ‘reflexive spit-back’ or mirroring occurring.

If in doubt, please try it yourself, although I advise to do the experiment with a very few Gb of files. You will see the ‘blue band’ grow in size, when you next check the ‘ipad storage’ or try again in an hour or two for larger amounts of files moved, it can take iCloud a while to adjust, which it prefers to do when you are not looking - sorry, I mean when your screen is off and the device is plugged in, to quote Apple more closely!

CAUTION: some trolls wander the alleyways of AudioBus and they aggressively stalk any person making a criticism of Apple Corp. Justified, does not matter. That there is a verifiable test they could do to prove the claims made are true, does not matter.
These people are not interested in technical issues, which I am.
They are oblivious to the technical issues and wrongful claims Apple Corp make about for example, the iCloud product/service.

The general Modus Operandi is to go after the person involved, NOT to test or ‘peer review’ the claims made about a technical issue, or a false claim or impression that has been bandied about in favour of a product or service.

I caution, that in light of this, I will not engage with such people, but will report them as soon as they stray from technical discussion or are impolite on a personal basis.

For example, a completely different video I may post on youtube, is not being on-topic. What I say here, is for discussion here. If somebody wishes to troll a different platform, that is their choice.

We should not tolerate aggressive and coordinated actions by groups of users (or by a single user purporting by multiple IDs to be multiple users), that amount to personal attacks on contributors.

I have opened up a discussion on a technical issue, that is making me purchase more memory, and more memory SD cards. I now am in the process of buying an 8Tb or at least much larger portable Hard Drive, to escape the grip of iCloud.

iCloud seemed like a solution, but it is not. It filled my PC when it was part of my iCloud, and now it has gone, iCloud intelligently has figured the iPad is the next largest local storage device it can control. So it fills that now instead.

At up to ten times the price of any other storage medium, and being non-upgradeable, iPad SSD limits made me purchase iCloud. Now, iCloud is pressing me to buy big, the next time I buy an iPad.

There’s no technical sense in what iCloud does, spitting-back a copy of files the user decided to place on iCloud! But, there is a sales strategy, that makes sense.

Take care, all, keep safe. I have put this information here, from my tests and hope it helps. If you are thinking of buying into iCloud, I am saying carefully consider a large 4Tb or larger portable SSD or spinning-disk hard drive instead. These systems, do not force a copy of the very data you are trying to safely store on them, right back at you. And, there are several youtubers ‘bigging-up’ iCloud, who even show they have such a device sat there. So, even these people, demonstrate it is no substitute or solution, for offloading large amounts of files/data manually.

The effect on my ipad was crippling. GarageBand simply stops working, constantly ‘optimises’ and instruments alerts that an Audio Unit is not present, when the user full-well knows it is are common. Other apps also suffer. Stuttering in GarageBand also becomes more common. By GB ‘constantly optimising’ I mean, every single change you make, or edit you make, GB will force you to wait while it optimises yet again. it’s impossible to create anything in that situation, I found.

In other words, once you are making quite a lot of large files and need to offload some, iCloud’s a very bad choice. And iCloud is not a backup system as such - not for manual use. Not even Apple say this, read the claims carefully. Is it only me that thinks it’s odd the single most straightforward use of a large offsite storage facility (shoving a load of files out to it to free up space on my local device), is the very thing iCloud turns into a damaging action? IE filling your own local storage up, as if by reflex, with the exact files you thought you were shoving-out (ie the ‘most recently used files’ as Apple Corp puts it).

And to the trolls, I want you off this site or any and all sites. You are immature and unpleasant. You are a bullying scourge. Please stay on-topic or don’t engage at all. Do the tests I have shown I have done, and come back if you have different results, or don’t argue. Your approach is visceral and personal, and has nothing to do with music or technical issues with the process of making it in modern music creation systems.

Thank you normal people.
Ian/sleekitwan (aka richard getts on itunes etc).