Q: How to locally sync an iPhone with OS X Mavericks? iCloud is NOT an option.

Drew, thanks for the link to the server threads- I would go back to 10.8.5 except that I have a new laptop on order which will lock me into 10.9 anyway, so need to find a solution for the long term. Also we have quite a lot of macs and I try and keep them all on the same OS for easier maintenance.  A clean install of Mavericks and transfer of my other files back using carbon copy cloner should be straight forward, but first I'll try and learn enough about server to do what I want- no fancy and potentially leaky access over the internet, just local access. I did not realise that installing server makes such fundemental changes to the OS installation!

Thank you again Barney-15E. That's really helpful. I'm ready to have a go now, but it may be a week before I do, as I'm travelling (and without internet) next week.

Re: Someone else's LAN: I only meant if I and my laptop and phone were visitng friends or similar, and used their DHCP operated LAN to do a Sync - not access in from the Web, for which I would also need to reconfigure my router firewall as well as sort out settings on my laptop.

James

Correct.

Stop blaming apple for disabling the use of you 500 bucks iphone. You acceptedby buying it that apple can shut down any function at any time.

If you want local and safe sync get a blackberry:

http://us.blackberry.com/support/transferring-to-bb10-device/transfer-contacts-m edia.html

Pentagon uses blackberry.

Teenagers use iphone.

Here's something for those who know German:

https://posteo.de/hilfe/wie-synchronisiere-ich-mein-adressbuch-mit-dem-iphone-od er-ipad

I know it's not local and it doesn't excuse Apple's slyly removal of their well established sync framework, but at least it keeps the Yanks' fingers off your data. Registration costs 1 Euro a month and can be paid via PayPal or cash, if you prefer complete anonymity. The company doesn't require any data for registration and it even removes your IP from email headers for enhanced privacy. 

florian170 wrote:

 

Correct.

 

Stop blaming apple for disabling the use of you 500 bucks iphone. You acceptedby buying it that apple can shut down any function at any time.

 

If you want local and safe sync get a blackberry:

http://us.blackberry.com/support/transferring-to-bb10-device/transfer-contacts-m edia.html

 

Pentagon uses blackberry.

 

Teenagers use iphone.

That's not very reassuring.

But this is even worse:

You go right ahead and switch to BlackBerry, they have their own forums for security issues.

Im considering reverting to Mountain Lion, however I had already deleted my Time Machine backup and replaced it with Mavericks before discovering this issue (I got rid of the Virtual CD nonsense of my external hard drive)

Its going to be a lot of effort to reinstall everything from scratch and copy data across.

Has anyone as an interim measure considered running Mountain Lion as a Virtual Machine in WMware?

Is it possible to sync iPhones/iPads with a Mountain Lion virtual machine running in Mavericks?

Is it possible to sync the calendars of the virtual machine with the host?

Its a messy solution but I hope someone with experience can enlighten us

The Pentagon have dropped their use of Blackberry. Do your homework before making more uninformed comments. Can you use Google?

Pete

<Edited By Host>

I think I have found a slightly convoluted workaround, until I get a local server working, but it does seem to give a proper bi-directional sync. You need a spare Mac, running an OS earlier than 10.9 otherwise nothing special.

Some background: In my normal workflow, at the end of each day I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full copy of my user folder onto a portable firewire drive. As this is an incremental backup, it only takes about 5 minutes just to modify the files that have changed/ been added or deleted. This drive then comes home and is synchronised with my laptop. If I end up doing email/changing files at home, the process is reversed and the external drive synced with the laptop and the drive taken back to work the next day to sync with my office machine. You remember the concept of 'sneaker net' where files went from one machine to another by being put on a floppy and walked (by sneaker) to the other machine? Well, this is sort of 'sneaker server'. The external drive in fact contains a full copy of my desktop boot drive but I tend not to synchronise the rest of the files every day.

So, having this full copy of my user folder, I attached the drive containing it to the old mac running 10.8.5. I then created a new user on the old mac with my normal user name and password. Watch your typing and that the short name is the same as for your normal mac. I then changed where the old mac would look for the new user to the external drive. To do this go to system preferences/ users and groups. Right click (option click) your user name to reveal 'Advanced options'. When you select this you get a set of advanced options, one of which is Home directory. This tells the operating system where to look for the user folder. This will say /Users/your user name. Change this to /Volumes/name of external drive/Users/your user name. Be careful of capitalisation. You can then log into your user folder on the old mac, and it actually looks to the user folder on the external drive. You can then launch the copy of itunes on the old mac running 10.8.5 and synchronise away to your heart's content with your iphone ipad etc etc.The changes go both ways so the copies of your calendars and contacts are fully up to date on the external drive and on your iOS devices. You can then sync the user folder on the portable drive with your main machine, again using Carbon Copy Cloner, and your data is fully up to date on your Mavericks Mac.You could of course do this by connecting the two macs together with the Mavericks machine in target disk mode, but until I have done more testing, I would be happier fiddling with the clone on the external drive in case something unexpected happens.

Caveats: Be very careful with this. I am not yet sure if there are any unintended consequences- for example will the new version of mail choke on the newly synchronised files which have been processed by mail under 10.8.5? You may need to rebuild your mailboxes. Make sure you have another backup of your main machine's  user folder incase something goes wrong- say time machine? As the saying goes: 'There are two sorts of users, those who back up, and those who will'. The old mac I used had 10.8.5 with the relevant versions of itunes and other software. My main mac has a fully up to date version of the Mavericks applications. It's quite a fiddle but in my case I am doing this back up routine daily anyway so it is not really a huge issue. If I become more confident with it and find that you can just connect the two macs with the Mavericks machine in target disk mode, it is really no trouble at all and would avoid all the extra work with CCC as you would effectively have one user folder being seen by two opeerating systems. In the end I will continue trying to make server work though it would be much nicer if Cupertino would fix what they broke or 'deprecated'.

Thanks very much Barney! Will try this.

Csound1 wrote:

 

Upgrading to Mavericks was your choice, doing so without checking that the services you require are available was your failure. Stop blaming others for your poor decision.

Does your lame excuse change the fact people came here are forced to sync online?

WH, I too will be glad if Apple bring back USB syncing. In the meantime I am looking for solutions which I don't have to pay extra for. I think it is within my technical limitations to get CalDAV and Card DAv servers running on my own laptop which will enable my iPhone to sync by wifi on a computer-to-computer basis when I don't have internet access or on my own home network. This will also mean that my data remains on my hardware rather than using a cloud service, so that's what I am trying.

I am lucky to be back on 10.8.5, with local sync intact, but will shortly be trying to set up local sync by wifi with my laptop, to see how feasible it is and help determine if I can stick with Apple even if they don't bring back local sync.  Having iCloud as an option is great, but being forced to it is not OK.  Most of the other options I've seen discussed rely on someone else's cloud, whether tightly encrypted or not, and I've too often been in situations where it was tremendously convenient to be able to enter information on my laptop where I have a real keyboard, and transfer it by wired sync to my phone, to be content relying on the not-yet-everywhere-I-want-to-go internet. 

ciu5781 wrote:

 

Csound1 wrote:

 

Upgrading to Mavericks was your choice, doing so without checking that the services you require are available was your failure. Stop blaming others for your poor decision.

Does your lame excuse change the fact people came here are forced to sync online?

Is that in English?

Gerrit7 wrote:

 

I read that OS X Mavericks will no longer allow me to use iTunes to sync my iPhone to a local system but makes iCloud mandatory? Is that correct?

I did not read through all the 71 pages of comments about this missing functionality but willl reply to the question in the first post: I was hit with the same problem and wrote a preliminary workaround.

It's in the iOS AppStore now, for free:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/devicesync-for-ios/id737867459?l=de&ls=1&mt=8

You have to download the OS X app as well: https://github.com/yep/DeviceSync-for-OS-X/releases

This is in a proof of concept state and works for me, but may not suite your needs. If you miss some functionality, please add an issue at github:https://github.com/yep/DeviceSync-for-iOS/issues.

I started with the possibility to sync contacts as well and will probably finish this feature as I find some free time.

Yep2,

iTunes provided a full bi-directional sync with automatic (and manual if needed) conflict resolution (the difficult part of a true sync solution).

Your "sync" function is only in one direction - from iOS to Mac, and just overwrites whatever data exists on the Mac, losing any recent changes made on the Mac.

I would call this a "copy" function and a "destructive" one at that, not a "sync" - so I think it is important people realise this before they rush to use it in the hope it replicates anything like the complete sync functionality that iTunes offered.