I have two AppleID's. Both use known email addresses. I need absolute security for documents. Can I set up a new Apple ID just for document syncing in iCloud? How?
MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)
When you create an icloud account, which includes services like email, calendars, contacts, notes, and data files from various apps, like Pages, you get the whole package. If you later log into icloud using a different ID, then that is a different account with different services.
If I understand your question, you want to keep one of the current accounts for things like email, contacts, etc. and add a different "secret" account using a secure ID just for syncing documents - if so, I'm afraid that won't work. You can only have one primary account. Either keep what you currently have, or establish a brand new ID for a new icloud account and use that for all the services.
Simply having a new, and thus somewhat less well known email address won't give you "absolute security" anyway. Nothing about any general online storage service offers absolute security. if you really need strong security for files, don't put them up online. Keep them on your computer and transfer them to your mobile devices only via your own intranet, or keep them on an encrypted USB device and take that with you.
I would not trust iCloud (nor dropbox, box, sugarsync, google or any popular online storage service) to keep anything "absolutely secure".
Point taken, Michael. My choice of words ("absolute security") was over the top.
You're probably right, though. So is there any reasonably secure way to worlk on a single document from multiple machines, or collaboratively with trusted colleagues at multiple locations?
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that security was non-existant or horrible, just it is online, so no absolutes.
iCloud is really not useful, IMO, for collaborating as only you or your AppleID enabled devices can access the files.
I have multiple online storage accounts with the common free services, but my most used is www.box.net. Many document apps will readily support it, and even if one does not, you can use the box.net app itself to access files, then open them in the app usually. And you can share your online folders, with reasonable controls on access to keep control of who can see (and upload or download) what.
A lot of people I know use dropbox as well, but they are usually using paid accounts (often their company sets one up for them to use to exchange files with clients) and I don't know how much better is the security on a paid dropbox account versus a free one. I suspect the free ones are on a par with box.net.
You could also use add security by using some sort of PGP or other encryption tools to encrypt files put up on the shared folder(s). You'd exchange public keys with your colleagues so they could decrypt those files once they download them. That may be overkill for many peoples needs though.
Another option, if you have an online hosting account, is to get one that offers SFTP access and use that for sharing files (the downside of that is having to distribute the password to colleagues, so you could loose control of it if one of them is careless or thoughtless with it). It seems more and more document-type apps for iOS are supporting generic FTP and SFTP as well as the popular free online storage solutions.
I have two AppleID's. Can I set up a new Apple ID just for document syncing in iCloud? How?
