Bournemouth — Feb 16th 2016
John suggested that the easiest way to think of iCloud is that it adds some more internet-based services to those we are already familiar with, such as the world wide web and email.
All these services store information somewhere in the Internet, then the service is provided by an application running on computers typically located in data centres or server farms.
The idea is that the user doesn't need to be concerned about where the data is, but only needs to know how to get at it, which in the case of the iCloud is via an Apple ID. Most iCloud services are about sharing data between iPad, iPhone and Mac.
John regards Contacts & Calendars as the essential iCloud services, although there are alternative services available via Google or Yahoo.
Other useful services include the syncing of Reminders, Notes and Safari bookmarks & tabs. IMAP e-mail accounts (including .me or .iCloud) also work well with iCloud, POP accounts less so because messages still need be deleted separately on each device, though some members found that reassuring.
iCloud Backup will backup iOS devices only, doing backups daily when connected by WiFi. However, this service will probably need more than the free 5GB allowance so John recommended backing up to your Mac (using iTunes) instead.
The next group of iCloud services covered included iCloud Keychain and Find my iPad/iPhone. John recommended the latter but was less keen on iCloud Keychain.
The most recent addition to iCloud is iCloud Drive. In El Capitan/iOS 9 this can be used to store any document, using a user-defined folder structure. As well as sharing between Mac and iOS devices, this can also be a handy way to share between two Macs and with other users. In answer to a question, John clarified that a Mac stores a local copy of all iCloud files but iOS devices do not.
Competitor's Cloud offerings were then briefly reviewed, including: Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, Virgin media Cloud, O2 Store & Drive and My Cloud from Western Digital which differs somewhat, effectively letting you set up a private cloud service.
John ended his talk by showing the facilities for management of iCloud storage usage. He also described Family Sharing whereby up to six family members can share purchases via the cloud. All are linked to the same credit card but each can have their own Apple ID and get their own 5GB of free storage. Another facility of Family Sharing is that the those with appropriate user settings can find the phone location of all members.
John then fielded a few questions before we took the customary tea break followed by a short Q&A session. This covered the use of Tinkertool to access hidden files, specifically to extract music from an iPod, the hazards of changing OS settings via Terminal and the use of aliases to avoid the frequent need to access a particular file in Library.
Comments
Page 1
Page 1