What is iCloud? iCloud is a cloud-based computer storage system. The cloud is a digital environment based on the Internet. iCloud has been in existence since 2011. iCloud gives you more storage for your Apple device, be it an iPad or iPhone or another device.
When you purchase an Apple product you can sign up for an Apple ID. You would use this ID for all of your Apple products. You don’t need a different ID for each product. For free, you get up to 5GB, which probably isn’t really enough. You can upgrade that. If you go to icloud.com you can create an account. You first put your email or phone number. I used my email address. You’ll need to create a password as well.
Whatever you do on your iCloud account, it will synch up with all of your devices. When you set it up and log in to the iCloud in your browser (I’m using Edge in Windows) you will see some icons representing apps. One app is the Drive. We can copy any documents from our computer to the iCloud Drive and have those available on our iPad or iPhone. iCloud is like Google Drive or Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive or Adobe Creative Cloud or any others.
If you have it set up on your Windows computer, you will see a folder in File Explorer called iCloud Drive.
You have the app Pages, which is like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Numbers is like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Keynote is like PowerPoint or Google Slides. There are other useful apps available as well.
On you iPad (or iPhone), click on the Settings app. tap your name at the top. Tap iCloud on the right side.
You can read the iCloud for Windows User Guide.
Upgrade
You can upgrade your free 5 GB of storage to iCloud+. What are the costs for that? I’m in Canada and the cost to get 50GB is 1.29 a month. 200 GB is 3.99 a month. 2TB is 12.99 a month. 6 TB is 39.99 a month. 12 TB is 79.99 a month.
Signing Out
You can sign out of iCloud, no problem. It doesn’t create any problems to sign out, but you temporarily won’t be connected to iCloud. Everything you have in iCloud will not synch back to your devices.