Multiple devices, family sharing...iCloud setup

Roderick,

I understand your issue with iCloud. I to have 5 iPhone's, 1 MBP, 1 MBA, ATV(1st gen) and iPad(1st gen) and I have my four iPhones on one iCloud account for backing up those devises. I could turn on Photo Streaming and take all photos off those devises and put them in one iPhoto library, I like that idea. I have all my devises using a different Apple ID for iTunes, so they all can be sync'd from my main iTunes account. To answer your question about the calendar, you should be able to turn on the iCloud calendar in the mail, contacts, calendars in settings to create one calendar that all devises can use. This way everyone will have one calendar with iCloud and a calendar they use with another email account.

So creating one family iCloud account that everyone can use for calendar access and Photo Stream. Then use different iCloud or other email account for everyone to use personally.

Hope this helps.🙂

Yes the specifics look right.

One main iCloud account for all devises with the use of a family calendar and Photo stream.

One iTunes account for all the apps, music and movies.

One email account on each devise for personal use.

Everything looks good from here. Just make sure you have everything off you will not be using on each devise with the family account and you should be just fine.

My setup is one family iCloud email for calendars, find my devise and backing up. They all have different email accounts for personal use and the main iTunes Apple ID so all devises are sync'd to the same library.

Hope that helps.

Hi all..
I hope you don't mind me chiming in here, but I see this as a major flaw in the move from MobileMe to iCloud.

Roderick, based on what your requirements are, this sounds like a viable solution.

Here's the spanner in the works:

Q: Can you have more than 1 iCloud account on each iOS device?

Everything I have found so far points to "No".

If you can't, and you all want to sync "common" contacts, iCal events & numbers/pages stuff, then you have to use 1 common iCloud account. But you will not be able to FaceTime or iMessage each other!

Is my assumption here correct?

I have a MobileMe family pack with 5 me.com addresses. I have kept the "main" one from migrating, so we currently keep all our contacts & calendars synced with that "main" account in MobileMe.

Simple solution for the time being, but what happens in June 2012 when MobileMe is retired?

Frustrated-dot-com!!

😕

Sorry but you can have more then one iCloud account on a devise. Using iMessage on a iPhone you just need to change the settings in iMessage to use the phone number not the iCloud account. If you had a family MobileMe account then every account should have its own iCloud email address. So check your settings for those features to work correctly.

grip72 wrote:

Sorry but you can have more then one iCloud account on a devise.

How? You can only have 1 iCloud primary account to use Photostream, backups, Find My iPhone, etc. You can have more than one for email, calendars and contacts by adding an account into Mail settings, but that is all.

That is correct. You can only have one iCloud account for photo stream, back ups, documents and find my devise. But iMessage should use the cellular connection not wi-fi, for devises with 3G access. You can have that one main account for all those features and another for the rest.

Yes that is correct. That is how I setup my devises.

That is correct.

Well, not sure Roderick. What if you turn off Bookmarks in your Primary iCloud account and turn it on in the secondary ones in Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars? Try that and see if it works.

Hey Roderick, that is correct. Turn off bookmarks on all other devises but yours. You can even set account changes restrictions so that information can be changed on those other devises. That way no one else can mess up your things or settings.