Michael Tsai - Blog - Apple Intelligence for Home’s iCloud+ Requirements

I reluctantly upgraded to a 2 TB family plan within the last year or so. We don’t store many files in iCloud, messages are set to auto-delete after a year, and I manually offload photos older than a year (except for hearted favorites). It’s hard to believe given how I remember the original 5 GB free tier once being sufficient, but staying under 200 GB became untenable without a lot of extra work. It doesn’t help that Live Photos sometimes gets inadvertently turned on, so that we’re storing all these little videos without realizing it.

I use a 2TB plan too. I recently enabled the setting to delete messages older than 1 year. I do however use iCloud as a backup service as well - and yes, I know it’s a sync service and not a backup service.

My photos use the most space on iCloud though. That’s why I’m highlighting this, perhaps as a reminder to myself to implement a system such as this - to remove non-favourited older photos. I would need to do this at some point. Also I’m not in the habit of favouriting things right now. So maybe I need to start doing that. I do love the featured photos feature and just the thought of deleting pictures is giving me the ick.