New to Mac with SOme Questions on Setup

[gustophersmob]

Howdy!

I've been using an iPhone for about 7-8 years now and my wife has had an iPhone for around 5 years. We currently use an ageing Windows laptop and have ordered an M1 macbook air to replace it.

So, I had a couple of questions:

1) We have different Apple IDs for our phones, and don't want them to sync the same. What is the best way to approach this on the shared MBA? I assume two separate user accounts, but not sure if that's the best approach or not.
2) We use a program called sync.com in lieu of iCloud/dropbox to back up all of our files. I know it is compatible with mac, but I'm not sure how the best way to set it up would be, especially if we use two separate user accounts as a result of question #1. If we have two separate user accounts, would we still be able to have access to a shared "sync" folder? Hopefully that make sense.
3) Currently on Windows, I use a 3rd party software (copytrans) instead of iTunes so that I can manually move files/pictures over. automatic syncing of the iPhones always seemed to end up overwriting or deleting things I didn't want lost. HOw is sync handled on mac, can it be done manually?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Stephen.R]

1) yes use separate user accounts on the Mac.

2) depends on how that sync tool works, but you can probably login to it from both accounts on the Mac. It may end up duplicating some files though. An alternative would be to migrate to iCloud Drive and family sharing, and then use a shared folder between your two iCloud accounts.

3) by far the easiest (for most people) solution for photos is to turn on iCloud Photo Library. It’ll sync your photos automatically, and also allows you to just keep thumbnails locally, with download-on-demand when you want to access a file. If you have enough storage space (on either phone or laptop) you can still choose to have it download all photos locally.

If you don’t want to use iCloud for photos you should still be able to have photos.app sync from your iPhone (you’d each have a separate photo library in your Mac accounts).

 

[gustophersmob]

Thanks for your help!

1) Thanks for the confirmation. From what I have read, it seemed like this was the best approach.

2) the sync tool, on windows at least, specifies a folder that is synced to the cloud and maintains local copies in that folder of all files (there is also a "vault" portion that is only stroed on the cloud with no local copy). On windows, we just ahve one user account and have all our files in the sync folder. Not knowing how user accounts work yet on mac, I assume you can set it up so that different user accounts can access the same folders. if so, it should work.

I prefer not to switch to iCloud, primarily because I like the end to end encryption offered by sync.

3) Since I don't want to use iCloud, if I understand how this works based on your input, we would log into the mac under our individual account and sync the iPhone. If we can share the sync folder (my assumption from #2 above), then I should be able to moved those files there (or direct it to point to that folder when it syncs?).

Is there an option to manually sync the files you want from the iPhone to mac, or is it all automatic?

 

[Stephen.R]

For 2 - you can have folders shared between both accounts yes. I don't know how well it'll work if you both try to run the "cloud sync" software though.

For 3 - if you just want to copy photos from the phone to a folder, you wouldn't be using Photos.app, you'd use Image Capture, and just tell it the directory to copy the image files to (the shared folder mentioned above).