How can I turn off iCloud completely?

Hey Chris - Can you tell us what they did at the Genius Bar to get your phone back to the good 'ol days?

I am thoroughly unimpressed with this iCloud roll out. Really confusing.

Wow. All this stuff is a bit of a pain. I have to say though, my iCal and Contacts are all OK now. Apple invited me to make a new @me.com email address and since then everything's been working fine. I just bought my MBP in March/11 and signed up with MobileMe and so had a bit of an issue when joining iCloud with my Contacts being invisible on my iPhone, but with the new (and additional) @me.com email addresss, everything is peachy! Thank goodness.

I'm not going to upgrade to Lion. Need to have a peaceful life for a bit. 😁

Hi randy, there is a short version and a long version of how I got back to the good old days. The short version is that in the icloud settings on both the computer and the phone, you simply slide all of the slider bars to off (mail, calendars, contacts, bookmarks, etc). Then to make sure it syncs by wire, you need to plug the phone into your computer and then in the phone's view in iTunes, make sure that the calendar, contacts, and whatever functions you want to sync are checked. These are the same screens and checks we have had all along, so it should be easy to make sure they are the way you want them. I left my iCloud account active in case I want it someday but I suppose you could completely deactivate the account.

The longer version is that I had damage control of lost iCal appointments and lost contact info to recover. The only iCal and contact stuff that was tricky to get back was stuff I had created while in the cloud. I can't recreate what the genius did to save all that stuff! But he did!

All is well now!

I have the same problem. I even reset ipad and iphone (erazed all data and set up as a new device), delete all backups on Itunes and icloud entries (manually on their web), disable icloud - and then when I thought everything is clean sync my devices and still have all 3 - 4 the same entries on devices in ical. THIS IS CRAZY- apple invaded in my devices and does whatever wants - more than a VIRUS! I can't get rid off it. Now I guess I have to spend most of my time to erase it manually from my devices! APPLE what the **** are you doing, making your new software behavour as a parasite! Who is first: customers or ......

I love Apple since it started and been a Mac user since it came out. Much that MobileMe was frustrating and had a lousy launch, I thought it was impossible to make something worse than MobileMe. Apple succeeded with this disaster, data destroying, heart burning, stomach churning and hours wasting beast called iCloud.

See iCloud Server Error: Can't add/edit contacts + it overwrites AddressBook edits By IMRAN Happy to have your thoughts on how to solve that nightmare. My last attempt (manually restorying my 5000 contacts in AddressBook, then painfully manually deleting contacts in iCloud {Select All > Delete there gives Server Errors also}. Finally managed. Then resyncing the MacBook Pro to iCloud led to 1000 contacts NOT syncing and no way except manually listing each address list side by side to figure out which ones it missed pulling in. Horror. Disaster. Shame.

For the user who says that turning off iCloud on the Mac and accepting its offer to delete data will delete data only on the cloud, sorry, but, unless I misunderstood you, that is dangerously wrong.

Like an evil spawn of SkyNet and a PC Boot Sector Virus, once iCloud has grabbed your data IT becomes the master of your data, your digital life. Deleting stuff means the stuff on your DEVICE (e.g. MacBook Pro, where you created and have all the ORIGINAL data in that iCloud sucked in) is what will be destroyed. Be careful.

If you're playing with this beast, not only make backups of your data in AddressBook and iCal, but invest in an external drive and clone your whole hard drive.

I am literally having to make a decision tonight, keep my MacBook Pro as the master, and sync via iTunes to the iPhone 4S and 4. I have an iMac mostly for music and video, which it was "cool" to have synced iCal and AB on, though not regularly used. But, after the hours wasted with iCloud, and the repeated data loss, I can live without the iMac being a synced device.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Imran Anwar

I activated iCloud on my MBP and iPhone a couple of weeks ago. I haven't had any trouble with synced data, but my computer has been very slow and doing a lot of pinwheeling. I tried to deactivate it on my MBP, and I was shocked to get the messages that calendars, contacts, and files would be removed from my MBP. I backed up my calendars and my address book, double-checked my Time Maching back-up, and clicked through the screens to deactivate iCloud. Indeed, my calendars disappeared (with the exception of the two Google calendars that I have via subscription). My contacts were not deleted, and all of my files appear to be intact.

Rather than restore my calendars from back up, I simpley plugged my phone in and synced it the old way. I received a message that I didn't need to back up that way, since things are backing up through iCloud. I had to click a few times, but it finally synced. Upon completion, my calendars were all back!

My computer seems to be functioning normally again. What a relief!

I am reading this thread in disbelief. Can iCloud really be this awful? I too wanted to disconnect from iCloud but was sacred off by the evil message about all content on my iMac would be deleted.

I mean, first of all, WHY? What on earth is the rationale for that? Why doesn ANYTHING have to be deleted?

Ach!

But anyway, I guess I'm fortunate that I haven't iClouded anything so far other than my contacts and calendars, but do I understand correctly that since my iMac and iPhone are synched thusly I can disconnect from iCloud, let it delete any **** thing it wants from my iMac, and I can then re-sync the calendars/contacts with the iPhone via hardwire?

I would second what Keksi said: backup before you turn iCloud off. I also ended up with a bunch of duplicate entries in contacts and iCal, but I removed them by playing around with the sync settings and resyncing until everything looked right. As a result, and despite having synced before de-iClouding, I lost all of the contacts that I had entered on my iPhone. I'm not sure why that would happen, but it has certainly been an inconvenience.

I truly hope that the issues with iCloud are resolved soon. I like the idea!

Best,

Bekah

Well with backups safely nestled on a remote drive I went ahead and disconnected iCloud at my iMac. Lo and behold the contacts and calendars remained unscathed. Great, I thought, now all I need to do is disconnect my iPhone and even if something is lost I can resync with the iMac.

No such luck. Oddly the calendar remained intact but the contacts were empty. Okay, no prob, I thought. I merrily booted iTunes and clicked the synching options and waited. After too short a time the synching completed and sure enough my iPhone's contacts remained empty.

After several exports/imports of the backup contacts I noticed that in the Contacts index list iCloud continued to be referenced as the holder of contacts, Ergo, I presume, there are none on my iMac to sync the iPhone with. This is ominous because I have iCloud turned off/disconnected at every point I can think of where my iMac might be hooking up with it.

I don't know what to do now. Apparently backing up the contacts list embedded its connection with iCloud and I have no way to tell it not to. Given that, I don't think even a restore of my iPhone would help if the contacts on the computer remain property of iCloud.

Can this be turning into any more insidious, 1984ish situation?

So all your contacts are there, but still connected to the iCloud. Right?

Well, yes and no. I mean theoretically I'm NOT connected to iC but the contacts are being told they belong to iC. If I go to the base-level index of Address Book "On My Mac" tops everything but nothing is in it. Directly below it is "iCloud" and under that are all my various divisions of the contact list.

Now as it happened I had a 3-week old backup of the AB, somehow. I deleted all the iC contacts and imported the old backup. I also deleted the iC account in the AB prefs so the only account was only "On My Mac" And great! There were my contacts with no reference to iC in the index. However, if I did the reverse--delete older backup contacts and import today's backup--not only does the iC indexing reappear but it also creates an iCloud account in the list of accounts without my doing anything.

On top of all this, when I imported that older contact list, my iPhone now will not sync at all. So I think I'm looking at restoring that puppy. Maybe that will fix it.

Anyway I did do what you describe perhaps not in that order but as you say I prolly don't want to go reestablishing the link to iC again to find out. And no I haven't investigated other forums. This was he first I found.

And yes, I hate iCloud too. And it's funny too, isn't there a story out there that Steve Jobs was quite perturbed with the team that brought us MobileMe; that he thought it was a failure? I can't believe he would have considered iCloud an improvement. Talk about "fail."

And yes, I hate iCloud too. And it's funny too, isn't there a story out there that Steve Jobs was quite perturbed with the team that brought us MobileMe; that he thought it was a failure? I can't believe he would have considered iCloud an improvement. Talk about "fail."

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MobileMe had one great advantage over iCloud. You could launch apps from iDisk and update them. You cannot do that with iCloud. There are no folders that I can conceive in Documents in the Cloud. Finally, when I download a Keynote file to my new iPad it reformats it from 16:9 to a 4:3 aspect ratio.

I'm looking for a cloud service that will let me launch apps firm a disk in the cloud. Until then, my Mac will be my cloud drive using Remote HD.

After playing with iCloud more in the last few momths, I have confirmed my initial feeling that iCloud is a disaster. Total failure, especially if you have spouse, kids, etc on the same Apple account since you keep getting each others stuff on your phone. But I do like the Find My Phone feature. Especially for the kids. I can keep track of where they are without them knowing 🙂