Timely payments can keep you from being unable to access all your iCloud digital data

A friend of mine who does tech support recently helped a friend who couldn’t access anything that was stored in her iCloud account. Anything that she has purchased, but which wasn’t already stored on her local machine, wouldn’t download or play. 

This included movies, music, and apps. While trying to find the problem, my tech friend says that a pop-up message appeared, saying the lady’s billing information was incorrect and that she needed to correct it (she’d changed banks and had a new card). After entering the new information, everything worked just fine. Apple had tried, unsuccessfully, to bill her for the 99 cent iCloud storage plan. As soon as the 99 cent payment cleared, everything was working again.

The moral of the story: 99 cents paid on time can prevent you from having any access to hundred of dollars of assets you purchase from Apple. I’m not talking about new services or buying new products. I’m talking about Apple keeping all of your digital assets “hostage” until you pay.

The second moral of the story: be sure and have local copies of all your data. Don’t depend on everything being available via “the cloud.”