Just a warning to everyone, some extra care and actions may need to be taken with regards to backing up iCloud data. It seems that one cannot restore iCloud data from a Time Machine backup. iCloud does provide some redundancy with Apple managing the primary copy of data but if one deletes some iCloud data by mistake, TM backups may not be as useful as you think.
Let me explain with an example. After moving to Mountain Lion I ended up with a number of seemingly duplicate Reminders lists in iCloud. As the *reminders* was not very important I decided to delete the duplicate lists. An hour or so later I noticed that it did not just delete the list from Reminders, it also deleted the associated calendars from Calendar with years of past and future *event* data :-( Of course, this delete also quickly propagated to my other iCloud clients. Fortunately, I had a Time Machine backup so I thought I would just restore the Calendar folder in ~/Library. Firstly, I had trouble restoring the folder itself (but that seemed to be due to some ACL issues). When I fixed that and had restored the folder Calendar would not open - I am not sure why exactly but after searching the Web I found that restores like this generally don't work for iCloud data. One of the reasons was that the iCloud data is considered the primary copy of the data. Any calendars that were restored would have been deleted automatically by the iCloud service (because, I guess, these calendars would be older than the current state of the iCloud data). The only way to reinstate seems to be to create a new calendar and import an exported version of the previous calendar. So the suggestion, for Calendar at least, is to regularly export your main calendars (as .ics files) and save them separately on or your TM backup. I am not sure but I guess similar applies for other iCloud data (e.g. Contacts?). I am not even sure how to export collections of Notes or how to recover if I had accidentally deleted / removed a Notes collection. This is quite a worry because I use Notes a lot. Hope this helps some and all the best for 2013! Cheers, Ashley. -- Ashley Aitken Perth, Western Australia mrhatken at mac dot com Social (Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc.): MrHatken Professional (LinkedIn, Twitter, Skype etc.): AshleyAitken Dropbox stores your files so you can access from any computer. Get it (and extra space for both of us) for free! Go to http://db.tt/geb9RWb _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
