Apple Transition of iCloud Documents & Data to iCloud Drive Goes Live

Apple announced some time ago that it would integrate the “iCloud Documents and Data” syncing service into iCloud Drive. Now the iPhone maker has completed the transition, requiring users to go to iCloud Drive to view their files.

After Apple announced last year that it would no longer support “Documents and Data” in the future, the company is now putting support entry (through Macrumors) that the cloud service no longer exists. The service is built into iCloud Drive. Apple users now need to use iCloud Drive to access their documents and files. The change should not affect the amount of storage used and thus not affect the available cloud storage.

Drive without support for older systems

Most iCloud users should already have the Drive service enabled, so no further steps are required. Only iCloud accounts created before 2014 need to manually activate Drive. The service may not be activated when using a device with operating systems older than macOS X Yosemite or iOS 8. The difference between Documents and Data and iCloud Drive is that the older service stores the files in folders assigned to a specific app.

This means that only the app that created the data can access the documents. iCloud Drive is a full syncing service, so all content can also be accessed through the Files app for iOS and iPad OS and Finder for macOS. Aside from the lack of compatibility with older Apple operating systems, iCloud Drive has no drawbacks, only benefits.