Recovering Cloudie Now Syncs Locally Again...
Hi, I joined MacRumors to discuss the issue of local sync, since I struggled with it. I'm in OS 10.10 (Yosemite.) I was lured by the siren's song of iCloud and thought I'd try it out. Got nervous about data security (Apple's been making the news a lot recently, regarding security breaches) and decided I wanted to go back to local sync for contacts/calendars. (I don't think local sync is possible for notes; wish it were.)
Long story short: Once you go to iCloud, getting your contacts and calendars "out of the cloud" is difficult--I basically had to "trick" iCloud out of my data. But it can be done, and then you can once again sync your iPhone with your Mac over a USB cable securely. So yes, it is possible to sync locally in Yosemite via iTunes; I'm a recovering "cloudie" and I sync locally again. See:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/27769760
There is also the SyncMate option.
----------
Oh, by the way...while I was going through the process of de-clouding, once I got contacts and calendars local again, I started to experiment with turning on a few cloud apps. I turned Notes back on (in sys prefs>iCloud), with no drama. Works great. But then I turned Reminders back on, and my local (mac) Calendar disappeared before my very eyes. Apparently Reminders wants access to the cloud version of a calendar? Since I had deleted my calendars from the cloud, accessing Reminders called the blank cloud calendar down into my local mac. So I had to restore Calendars all over again. I don't use Reminders at all, now. There may be a way to do it but I decided to stand pat. Never really figured out the advantage to Reminders over a list in Notes, anyway.
