Tech Troubles - Avoid iCloud!

Apple's iCloud service sounds great and for me it was until March 25, 2012. I had difficulty setting it up initially as I discovered that my Apple ID I set up for iTunes a long time ago would not work with Apple's iWork suite because I had that linked with MobileMe - for which Apple had given me a separate account. But I managed to get it working nicely (despite the annoyance of calendars not syncing).

Last night I reworked a poem. When I woke up this morning I picked up my iPod to work on it before an idea vanished. The poem was not there! I wasted a goodly chunk of the morning trying to get my three IOS devices to sync with my macBook - no luck - some of them said files were 'updating' ( and still are as I write this at 2:17 p.m.).

So it seems Apple is having server problems? Who knows? Who cares?

I don't have the time or patience to bother. So what I will do from now on is send new versions of docs, or new docs as email attachments to myself, then upload to Box and use Box in place of iCloud.

Even should Apple get their crappy cloud system back up I no longer trust it. By using emails and Box my files will be backed up on the device, my MacBook and on Box.


March 25, 2012 UPDATE


By fiddling and a bit of intuition, I have managed to get iCloud to work again - but only by turning off iCloud for Pages and Keynote on my iPhone - it now works for the iPod, iPad and my MacBook Pro - which is annoying, but at the least I needed it to work on my iPad and MacBook where I do most of my writing. I still don't trust it, of course - so after each document revision on my iPad, I email to myself, then open the attachment on my iPad which causes a menu to pop us asking me where I want the doc - and one of the choices is Box... so I choose that and it then asks which folder in box I want the doc.  Then if I need to do revisions, I can move them easily from Box to Pages.  Annoying but iCloud needs fixing!  I don't know if the problem was caused by my iPhone, or whether iCloud was just down for a week and my turning the cloud off on my phone and iCloud coming back online was just coincidence.  Doesn't really matter which as I cannot trust the service anymore.

May 16, 2012 Update

Reading through MacForums I found many others with the same problems - especially with the calendars. In the Apple official help forums I found a 'sort of' work around - you can send individual documents to iTunes to back up there, and retrieve them from there.... so this can operate as a kind of secondary backup to Box.net. I don't know how many files and what size you can store on iTunes... and they won't be organized in any fashion that makes them easy to find....As for iCloud, I kept trying as above - but for about 20% of my docs it still does not work....so I will make sure everything is on Box and then turn it off on my iPod and iPad and ignore it on my MacBook. I wonder if anyone at Apple knows or cares? I grit my teeth whenever I see their ads! To paraphrase an old ad campaign of their's "It just does not work"