Here are some of the most common problems people have when syncing accounts to iCloud.

The easiest way to think of The cloud is to imagine a large connected disk drive attached to your computer. All your documents, music, pictures and other stuff can be stored there. But this special disk only allows access with the proper credentials. If you don’t know the password and user name you don’t get access. If there is no internet, there is also no cloud. Once you grasp this concept the rest starts to fall into place.

 

Apple’s flavor of cloud computing works best with Apple products and contains “built-ins” that take much of the guesswork out for you. Ideal because most Mac owners have other Apple devices that should carry the same information across them. The most likely items you’re trying to sync are contacts, calendars or documents. If you use suggestions in this guide, keep in mind that it can take a little time for things to sort out once you make a change so if you know you have all the settings correct and are still having problems, wait a quarter hour or so before checking your efforts. If it absolutely is not working after following this guide, contact Apple Support for iCloud, or give Denver Mac a call.

 

These instructions are written for Mac users, PC users will find resources on related sites.

 

CHECK SETTINGS

Most problems can be resolved by fixing these. For iCloud, settings consist of having the iCloud services turned on, choosing which items to sync, and using the same credentials among each device in the sync. For our example we will be syncing calendars between a Mac and iPhone.  An iPad and other Macs work the same way. You’ll need to find the right settings and turn things on.

 

Assuming here you’re running OS X 10.7 LION. Start with your Mac. System Preferences > iCloud. Item that you wish to sync should be checked off in the list at the right. A valid iCloud account is shown with a name under the iCloud icon. In the picture below, the text where your account name will appear is shown as “Your Account.” If there is no name that appears under the iCloud icon, click Sign In and enter the email address you have registered with Apple. You’ll need to enter the password as well.

 

 

Paramount to iCloud syncing is iCloud itself. It is an easy mistake to try syncing between two devices without verifying your stuff hit the cloud. If you are troubleshooting, start with just one device and the cloud. Turn on syncing in one of the devices (usually a Mac first) then check to see if that information hits the cloud BEFORE turning on syncing on another device. Knowing that iCloud itself is a device, troubleshooting gets simplified. You access iCloud through your internet browser. Go to http://www.icloud.com after turning syncing on in your first device to make sure everything works right.

 

It may take a few minutes to get everything uploaded, there are progress indicators while the sync takes place. Understand that when you enable iCloud, your space on Apple’s cloud servers becomes active. That active space is the core of your cloud. Devices don’t sync to each other, they all get their information from iCloud, its the middleman in the process. Use a web browser to go to that core: http://www.icloud.com

 

 

After signing in, take a look at contacts and calendars in the iCloud web browser. The items you sync’d earlier should be accessible in the cloud. iCloud holds the items you have linked from your Mac. It is your home master. Adding or deleting information from sync’d items in your Mac should reflect in iCloud from your web browser and visa versa. Try it out before proceeding further by adding test contacts or calendar events. You can delete them after your testing from either the device or directly from iCloud with your browser. Changes should get updated across your first two synced devices – Mac and iCloud. If this doesn’t happen, don’t go any further until this crucial step gets resolved.

And as mentioned before, make sure anything in your new sync group is connected to the internet. WIFI or phone band work as long as nothing between your device and the internet such as a firewall or router is blocking access.

 

Now to add a second device to your cloud sync. Here, we’re going to add an iPhone to the mix. The pictures below are what the settings look like on iPhone running IOS 5. The top graphic shows the list of settings. Choose iCloud and that takes you to the second window. The most important item is at the top of the second graphic – Account. You need to sign into iCloud on the new device with the same credentials used with your first device. Now choose what you would like to sync on the second device. In the example below just about everything is turned on except Photo Stream and Documents & Data.

 

 

 

We will need to look for messages from iCloud after we turn the sync on. There might be contacts or calendar events that do not match up with what iCloud holds from our first device and iCloud will both warn us and give options for syncing. Again it is best to choose merge when adding new devices to your iCloud but you’ll need to think things through because your case may be different. For example you may have built the bulk of your contacts or calendar entries on your phone instead of your Mac. You may have separate mail accounts on different phones or some other uniqueness that will need thought before you start clicking the options iCloud gives when adding accounts. Just think it through before making decisions and it will with good likelyhood work itself out after a few hours.

 

Continue adding devices using the same process outlined here until all of your devices are included. Now giving a little time for the syncing to catch up with all your devices, you should enjoy cloud computing Apple style.

 

 

Some problems we have seen in iCloud syncing and how to fix them:

 

Families sometimes share a Mac between them but have separate iCloud accounts: Set up separate accounts on the Mac using each person’s iCloud account assigned to each Mac account.

 

After syncing to iCloud, entries in Calendar and Contacts get double entered: Turn iCloud off in each device. Clean up calendars and contacts on the devices. Then turn on iCloud again to delete duplicates. See this Apple Tech article for more information on deleting duplicate iCal entries: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4118  And also here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4968

 

We will add more here as it become available.

(c) Denver Macintosh 2012