iCloud

Pat has four macs in various locations and wants to know if they will all be synced with iCloud like DropBox does. Leo says yes and no. It will sync, but not via a folder. The key is all the same Macs running the same shared Apple ID. Can she go work on different macs simultaneously? Leo says that could be problematic. To do team operations, a good third party app is GitHub.

Debbie has an old 2007 MacBook. She can't plug her iPhone to it and transfer her data. iPhoto keeps quitting on her. Leo says that she can turn on Wi-Fi syncing on the phone and use that option. It's slower, but it will work without crashing. iCloud Syncing is also a good option. Then she can sync it without even running iPhoto.

Drew has taken over 1,000 photos on his iPhone and he wants to put them online. Leo says that Google Photos is a brilliant solution for that. It just came out and he'll get unlimited free storage from 16 MP or less, plus video. He can also create folders and slideshows. Leo's going to do this for his trip. Drew can then share the collections via link, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. iCloud can also do it through iCloud Drive. But he has to enable it.

Diana bought a new Apple iPhone 5. The Apple store employee merged her contacts, but every contact in her phone was from iCloud and not her personal contacts. Leo says that's probably true. He assumed that Diana's phone was backed up, and it wasn't. Going forward, Diana should continue to backup to iCloud so if she loses her phone, she'll still have her contacts. She should just clean it up first. Then back up her contacts to the Cloud and have it continue to backup regularly.

Marian needs to connect five wireless devices to the same storage. Leo says that the easiest would be to buy storage in the cloud. iCloud would be the best option for Marian's Apple needs, and she can direct data to be automatically backed up to iCloud and then access all of it from any of her devices. Videos is going to be a challenge, though. But for images, Apple's new Photos app does it all automatically once she turns on iCloud Drive. It'll also put size appropriate versions for her device automatically, which will save space.

Rick has several iMacs and wants to be able to work between them, but he's concerned with multiple logins and iCloud accounts. Leo says it's a mess that Apple has created because they don't know how to merge iCloud accounts. He can share it with family sharing, but then he can't keep his own data separately. The answer is to have an iCloud account that is associated with only his login. That makes the data isolated and safe.

Tom wants to be able to save text messages from an old iPhone. How can he do that? Leo says that if they were using an Apple system, it may already be saved through Apple's cloud services. He can also contact the phone carrier to see if they save copies of the messages.

The Chatroom says iExplorer from Macroplant could do it. Macroplant has a tutorial on how to do it here.

Nancy has an iPad 2 and now she's running out of room. She's downloaded all of her pictures, but she's worried about Apple deleting her iCloud backup if she hasn't backed up within 180 days. Leo says it's easy to just turn on iCloud backup on the iPad in the settings and it'll do it automatically. But if she has run out of space, then Leo advises to either go in to the settings and delete the iCloud backup, or pay $0.99 for 20GB. Then she won't get that warning.

Robert is a college professor and he wants to take all his desktop files and put them in the cloud, syncing them with his laptop and desktop computers. Leo says there's several ways to accomplish that goal. ICloud will do it if you have a Mac. Both Microsoft's OneDrive and DropBox will do it for both Windows and Mac. Leo says that DropBox is probably the simplest way to go about it. The Chatroom says that Box.net is hipping compliant as well.