How to Move from iCloud to Another Cloud Service (October 2026)

Moving from iCloud to another cloud service means copying each category of your data out one at a time: photos, Drive files, contacts, calendars, mail, passwords and device backups. There is no single switch in iCloud that moves everything, so you export, upload, check the copy, and only then turn off syncing. Here is how to move from iCloud to another cloud service without losing anything.

The order matters more than the speed. Most of the mess I see comes from people deleting out of iCloud while an upload is still half-finished, or from assuming a folder on their Mac held a full-resolution photo when it was only a placeholder. Get the data out, verify it landed, and only then start removing things from Apple’s side.

What You Need

You need four things before you touch anything: working access to your Apple Account, a local backup of the device, the destination service already set up, and enough free space to hold the originals while they upload. Missing any one of these turns a two-hour job into a weekend.

• Your Apple Account password. Confirming it under Settings or System Settings avoids the account lockout that stalls a migration half way through. Enable two-factor authentication on a device you can reach.
• A fresh local backup. On iPhone: Settings, your name, iCloud, then Back Up Now. On Mac: Apple menu, System Settings, your name, iCloud, Back Up Now. This is your safety net if anything goes wrong during the switch.
• The destination service already created and installed. Install its desktop client for Mac or Windows and sign in before you start uploading, so uploads land in the right library.
• Enough local disk space to stage originals. Cloud-optimized placeholders are tiny. Real originals are not.
• A cable or reliable network, depending on the route. A direct USB transfer is faster than pulling everything down and pushing it back up.

How long the transfer takes

Time is bound by your upload speed, not by the destination service. Rough numbers for a home connection:

Data size	At 20 Mbps up	At 100 Mbps up	At 500 Mbps up
20 GB (a few thousand photos)	About 3 hours	About 35 minutes	About 8 minutes
100 GB (a decade of phone photos)	About 12 hours	About 2.5 hours	About 30 minutes
500 GB	About 3 days	About 13 hours	About 2.5 hours
1 TB	About 6 days	About 26 hours	About 5 hours

These are upload-side estimates and they assume nothing else is competing for bandwidth. Plan for roughly double if your library holds a lot of ProRAW or 4K video, since those files are enormous compared to what you see in a synced thumbnail. If you want a per-category estimate instead, count your library first in Settings, your name, iCloud, Manage Account Storage.

Step-by-Step

1. Prepare Your Mac or iPhone and Destination Service

Update the device, confirm your Apple Account password, take a fresh local backup, and sign in to the destination service before you begin. Skipping the sign-in step is why uploads sometimes land in the wrong library or stall silently.

1. Update macOS or iOS to the current release. Old versions of Photos and Files change menu names, and an outdated client can silently convert originals.
2. Confirm you can sign in to your Apple Account and complete two-factor authentication.
3. Run a local backup: Settings, your name, iCloud, Back Up Now on iPhone, or Apple menu, System Settings, your name, iCloud, Back Up Now on Mac.
4. Sign in to the destination service on the device and on your browser, so both routes point at the same library.
5. Check the destination’s storage ceiling against your largest category, which is almost always photos. Check current limits and plan tiers on the provider’s own page rather than trusting a figure quoted in an old article.

One thing to decide now: turn off Optimize iPhone Storage and Optimize Mac Storage before you copy anything. Those toggles leave only low-resolution placeholders on the device, so there is nothing local to copy. On iOS go to Settings, your name, iCloud, Photos, and turn off Optimize iPhone Storage. On macOS the equivalent control sits under System Settings, your name, iCloud, iCloud Drive and is now sometimes labelled Sync this Mac. Recent iOS releases instead offer Download Originals to This iPhone; either way the aim is the same, real full-resolution files sitting on local disk.

2. Choose Which iCloud Data You Are Moving

Every iCloud category leaves through a different door, and some can only be copied rather than exported. Inventory yours before you start, because the easy categories are not the ones that cause stress later.

iCloud category	Where it lives	How it leaves iCloud
Photos	iCloud Photos library	Apple Data and Privacy request, or export from the Mac Photos app
Drive files	iCloud Drive, plus the Desktop and Documents folders	Download from iCloud.com or copy the local folder
Contacts	iCloud Contacts	Export as a vCard file, then import elsewhere
Calendars	iCloud Calendars	Export as an .ics file
Notes	iCloud Notes	Export as HTML or PDF from the Mac Notes app
Reminders	iCloud Reminders	No built-in export; handled manually or by script
Passwords	iCloud Keychain	Item-by-item export, or a one-time CSV export on iPhone
Mail	@icloud.com or @me.com address	Forward, or reuse the address as an alias on a new account
Device backups	iCloud backup of a device	Managed locally; can only be restored to an Apple device
Find My	Find My network	Cannot be moved; depends on Apple’s network

Notice what is missing from that list: Find My, Shared Albums and anything else tied to Apple’s device-finding network. Those do not migrate. If you are leaving the ecosystem, accept that you will be giving up remote location, AirDrop-to-Android and shared photo albums. Know that going in.

3. Export Your iCloud Photos

Photos are the largest category and the only one where a careless choice permanently damages your library: if the date and time metadata is lost during export, Google Photos and OneDrive both stamp everything with today’s date. There are two reliable routes, and the Mac route preserves metadata far better.

Route A, the Mac Photos app (best metadata fidelity):

1. Confirm originals are local, using the settings described in step 1, and open Photos on the Mac.
2. Select the library in the sidebar, then use Select All.
3. Choose File, then Export. In the panel choose Export Unmodified Originals, and tick Include Title, Keywords, and Caption along with Include Location Information.
4. Pick a destination folder outside iCloud Drive, such as an external drive or a local folder. Exporting back into iCloud Drive defeats the whole exercise.
5. Let it run. Large libraries take hours, and the Photos app can look frozen while it writes files.

That option set is the one users on Reddit and the Apple support communities consistently report as the method that keeps original dates intact, camera serial data and location attached to each file. Plain ZIP export on older releases gives you files without the sidecar data, which is why so many migrated libraries end up with everything sorted by the day of migration.

Route B, Apple’s official request: sign in to privacy.apple.com, choose Request a copy of your data, select iCloud Photos and anything else you want, then submit. Apple emails a link when the archive is ready. This route is thorough and covers categories that are awkward elsewhere, but it is slow: people commonly report waiting several days, and the archive arrives as a huge nested folder of HTML indexes and original media that still has to be unpacked and uploaded yourself.

Which route is better for photos: iCloud or straight off the iPhone? If your Mac library is complete and current, exporting from the Mac is faster and preserves originals. If the Mac is slow or low on disk, a direct USB backup to the iPhone followed by an export from the Photos app on iOS works too, but the iOS Photos export historically omits some sidecar metadata that the Mac includes.

4. Move Photos to Google Photos, OneDrive, or Another Service

Upload the exported originals to the destination, in batches, from the desktop web interface rather than the phone app. The web uploader gives you a progress count and a visible list of failures; the phone app hides both.

• Google Photos: open photos.google.com on the Mac, use the upload icon, and drag the exported folder in. Google Photos matches duplicate hashes, so re-uploading a batch after a failure only sends the files that did not make it. Uploads can report random failures partway through a folder, and the same retry may fail again until you open a fresh browser tab; keep going and re-drag the folder at the end.
• OneDrive: use the OneDrive desktop client, sign in, and drop the folder into My Devices or Documents. OneDrive flattens folders you drag in from a desktop folder on some versions, so move files into a named subfolder first.
• Dropbox, pCloud, Proton Drive, Sync.com: all accept a plain drag from Finder or File Explorer. For huge libraries a desktop client is much faster than the browser uploader.

For very large libraries, uploading the same folder into a desktop sync client is the only realistic route: browsers throttle long uploads and a single browser tab will drop the connection. Keep your Mac awake and on mains power, and consider a third-party migration tool for one-time cloud-to-cloud transfers instead of routing the data through your own disk twice.

Stop iCloud Photos syncing before you start the upload. Running iCloud Photos and a competing auto-upload at the same time produces duplicates and stalled transfers, because both apps are writing into the same library folder while the system tries to keep placeholders in step.

5. Transfer Contacts and Calendars

Contacts and calendars are the easiest categories because both export as standard files that every other service can import.

Contacts:

1. On Mac, open Contacts, then File, then Export, and choose Contact Archive or vCard.
2. Save the .vcf file to a local folder.
3. Sign in to the destination account, open its contacts section, and use Import or Import contacts.
4. Select the .vcf file and let it finish. A large address book can take a few minutes; the importer shows no progress bar, so leave the tab alone.

From iCloud.com, sign in, open Contacts, choose the gear or list icon in the toolbar, then Export vCard for the same result. On iPhone you cannot export the whole address book from Settings, so use the Mac or the web route for the full copy.

Calendars: on iCloud.com open Calendar, click a calendar in the sidebar, then use the share icon next to the title and choose Export Calendar. That downloads an .ics file, which Google Calendar, Outlook and Proton all import cleanly. Export each subscribed calendar separately, and untick alerts before sharing a calendar that contains birthday entries from other people if you would rather not import reminders you do not own.

Recurring events survive the .ics round trip. Duplicates are the usual complaint, and they appear when you import a calendar that already synced automatically, so turn off automatic iCloud calendar syncing in the destination account before you import anything.

6. Move Files, Notes, Reminders, and Passwords

Drive files, notes and reminders copy out in different ways, and passwords are the category where people most often lock themselves out. Treat each on its own terms.

iCloud Drive files: the simplest category. Sign in to iCloud.com, open Drive, select what you need and download it, or install Google Drive for Desktop, OneDrive or Dropbox and copy the files straight into the synced folder. Watch out for Desktop and Documents syncing: on macOS these appear in iCloud Drive as if they are ordinary folders, and they may hold references and aliases rather than real files. Open several before trusting a copy.

Notes: iCloud Notes export to HTML or PDF, which means text and basic formatting survive but note formatting, attachments and folder structure do not. On Mac, open Notes, select a folder, select the notes inside it, then File, Export Notes. There is no single button for every note in every folder, so work folder by folder.

Reminders: Apple ships no export for Reminders at all. Move them by hand into the destination to-do app, or complete and clear the ones you no longer need. If you have hundreds, a short script that reads the Reminders database is the sane route.

Passwords: iCloud Keychain will not hand over its whole database in one clean file, so decide what you actually want.

• On iPhone, open Settings, then Passwords, choose the three-dot menu, then Export Passwords. You will authenticate with your device passcode and approve the export on your Mac.
• The export is a .csv file. Import it into 1Password, Bitwarden or similar, then delete the CSV. A plaintext spreadsheet of every password you own is not something to leave on a desktop.
• Items stored on websites, in the keychain under their own app entries, and shared family passwords sometimes do not appear in the export. Sign in to icloud.com/find, open Keychain, and move any missing credentials by hand.
• Before you turn off iCloud Passwords on any device, confirm you can log into one account from a clean browser using the new password manager. Do that first, not later.

Can you sync iCloud with OneDrive rather than copying once? Not natively. The two services do not mirror each other, and there is no supported bridge between them, so treat it as a one-time copy. Anyone promising a continuous iCloud-to-OneDrive sync is either building one out of a desktop folder sync or selling you a transfer tool.

7. Verify Everything Before Disabling iCloud

Check the copies before you delete anything, category by category. This is the step that separates a migration from a data loss event.

• Compare counts: total photos in iCloud against the destination’s item count.
• Open ten random photos from three different years and confirm the dates are right and each one opens at full resolution.
• Spot-check Drive files by opening three from different folders, not just the ones you recognise.
• Confirm the contact count matches and the newest entries are there.
• Confirm each calendar shows the right number of events.
• Test a password from the new manager in a private browser window.
• Make sure the local backup from step 1 still exists and has not been rotated away.

One question comes up every time people delete at this stage: will deleting photos from iCloud also delete them from the new service? No. Once a copy exists in another account, it belongs to that account. Google Photos and OneDrive do not watch your iCloud library and remove matching files when you delete them there.

8. Turn Off iCloud Sync and Clean Up

Only now remove iCloud from the picture, and free the storage you were paying for. The safest sequence removes syncing first and data second.

1. On iPhone: Settings, your name, iCloud, then switch off the individual services you moved, such as Photos, Drive, Passwords and Find My. Leaving iCloud itself switched on but empty keeps Apple Account sign-in working.
2. On Mac: System Settings, your name, iCloud, then uncheck the services you migrated.
3. Check Manage Account Storage, or iCloud, Manage Storage on the device, to see what Apple still holds: device backups usually dominate.
4. Delete old iCloud device backups only after your local backup of that device exists somewhere you trust.
5. If you are leaving the Apple ecosystem, cancel the iCloud subscription in Settings, your name, Subscriptions. Do not cancel first: doing it early can remove synced data before you have copied it.
6. If you are staying on iPhone but off iCloud+, open Optimize iPhone Storage so future photos stay local rather than as placeholders.

After the switch, check which apps still depend on iCloud. Find My, Shared Albums, iCloud Messages and any app that syncs its own documents through iCloud Drive will either stop updating or show empty until you sign them in to a replacement. Expect a few days of small breakage rather than assuming you did something wrong.

Common Mistakes

Nearly every failed migration comes from one of these. Each has a straightforward fix, and all of them are cheaper to prevent than to undo.

• Exporting only the last few years of photos. Albums are views, not folders, so selecting recent albums and exporting gives you a fraction of the library. Select the whole library from the sidebar and count what you exported against the total in Manage Account Storage.
• Forgetting files that lived outside iCloud Drive. Mail attachments in iCloud Mail, files sent through Messages, and app data in iCloud containers are easy to miss. Search iCloud.com for large file types you do not remember storing.
• Running out of room at the destination mid-transfer. The upload stalls or fails quietly. Check the destination’s limit against your largest category before starting, and keep the archive until the count matches.
• Importing calendars on top of an automatic sync. Events appear twice. Turn off iCloud calendar sync in the destination account first, then import the .ics file.
• Losing access to passwords. People export Keychain, cancel iCloud, and discover the CSV was incomplete or never imported. Log in from a clean browser with the new manager before touching iCloud Passwords.
• Deleting too early. Removing from iCloud before the copy is verified leaves you with whatever uploaded successfully, which is rarely everything. Keep iCloud intact for at least a few weeks after verification.
• Photos landing with today’s date. Almost always the wrong export option, not a bug in the destination service. Re-export with Include Title, Keywords, and Caption and Include Location Information ticked.
• Leaving Optimize Storage on. With placeholders in place there is nothing local to copy, so the export produces empty or thumbnail files. Turn it off and wait for originals to finish downloading.

Above all, treat photo dates as the number one thing worth protecting. A library that is complete but sorted wrong is a long weekend of manual fixing; a library that is missing files is not fixable at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The safest way to move from iCloud to another cloud service is to work one category at a time and finish each one before starting the next. Photos take the longest and deserve the most care, because that is the only category where a mistake quietly rewrites dates you cannot get back. Export originals from the Mac, upload them in batches, compare counts, test a handful of files and only then touch your iCloud settings. Everything else, contacts, calendars, notes, passwords, is quicker once that habit is set.