[Dave1510]

Hi,
I'm new here, and have a question, which I hope you can answer...

I have had an iCloud account for ages, as I have an ipad (air2) and iPhone (7). I pay £0.79 per month for 50Gb Storage.

Dropbox have recently stated that they are limiting users to 3 devices for their free service, and I have about 7 devices linked, and they are not offering a "small fee" for their paid for service, so I am looking for alternatives...

I tend to keep files in a central "cloud" and prefer to have local copies in a location on my PCs (as per dropbox, iCloud etc). The main file on the PC is updated, and updates the cloud, and if I log on to a different PC, the file is updated when I log in.

This works with Dropbox, but for some reason, in the iCloud, the main file keeps changing it's name by adding a number as a suffix.

Example:
I created a Excel file to test in the cloud, and called it xyz(.xlsx) a copy was created in my users folder "xyz", and I created a shortcut on my desktop, pointing to the local copy.
Clicking on this opened the local file, and I made a change, saved it, and the local copy saved, and the cloud version had also been modified.
So Far so good.

However, a while later, I clicked the shortcut, to get the message that the file the shortcut pointed to was no longer there...!!!

I navigated to the local copy, to find it had now been called "xyz (1)" … I tried again with a fresh s/c (to xyz (1)) and that was OK, until I reopened it (yes xyz (2)).

The cloud web based browser has all the different versions saved (now up to "xyx (4)". All versions are also all visible on my apple devices too

Is there a way to avoid this, or do I need to look for an alternative method. (maybe a setting??) otherwise I'm going to end up with a very full cloud very quickly.

Hope someone can help.

Thanks

[Lee_Bo]

Hi @Dave1510, and welcome to iMore.

I'm unsure of that as I haven't been on a Windows machine in years, but hopefully someone who has will be along and reply soon.