Hello everyone,
I am the creator of this post. Sorry that I have not written here in so long, I have not tried any of your suggestions until today. In fact, I did not touch my computer since early October until today. I'm saying this so it is clear that nothing has changed from early October until today.
I did install OS X 10.11.1 just now, and was successfully able to log in to iCloud in the little "Setup Assistant" thing upon the end of the update.
The issue I have may be slightly different from that which you have. Please read this ENTIRE POST carefully because I want to be very clear so that you don't mistakenly think we have the same issue — unless, of course, we actually have the same issue. My Mac is logged into iCloud. All data, documents, passwords, etc. are syncing FINE. AirDrop works, thanks to another post on another forum, Handoff does not. (The people on that forum are still trying to figure out how to fix Handoff.) iMessage and FaceTime do not work as per my original post. I've stopped trying with them — you could say I gave up.
I came across aPenguin's suggestion a while back but didn't do anything. Now I have a serious question to everyone, in particular aPenguin and those who followed aPenguin's advice.
Long story short: A long time ago, maybe a year ago, I was playing with some passwords and possibly logging in and out of iCloud, not sure why, and suddenly I lost my passwords. A few days before, I had changed all my passwords because I was afraid of "Heartbleed" or some other huge Internet flaw like that. I had changed my password on every website to an auto-generated password generated by Apple's iCloud Keychain. And now I had lost all of these passwords. LUCKILY my iPad's wifi had been off. I quickly wrote down or otherwise backed up these passwords before they would sync to my iPad, and was able to restore most passwords. Some I actually never found for some reason, and I had to click "Forgot Password" on some sites. Huge headache, as you could imagine.
Sorry to bore you! My point here is, I am horribly afraid of logging out of my iCloud account. I fear that when I press sign out, and I get all of these messages saying "your (notes, documents, calendars, reminders, etc.) will be deleted from this Mac but will remain in iCloud," they will be deleted from my Mac and I'll never be able to get them back.
I'm 99.9% sure that all I need to do is either log out of iCloud and back in OR do the Terminal command aPenguin recommended which basically does the same thing. I'm 99.9% sure that this simple step will solve my problem forever.
But I'm 50% sure that doing this will delete my data, if not forever, I won't be able to get it back on my Mac.
And the optimists will say, "Just back it up." Yeah, but that's a **** of a lot to back up. Each note, document in Pages, Keynote, Numbers, reminder, calendar, password, everything? Come on!
Someone please confirm that logging out of iCloud actually deletes all this data, and logging back in will IMMEDIATELY RESTORE THE DATA EXACTLY AS IT WAS. If you're not sure how to prove this to me and anyone else like me, just do the Terminal command again. Then look to see if all your iCloud stuff was deleted. Then log back in. Then make sure it's restored. PLEASE TELL ME HOW IT GOES.
Thank you very much for your time and for risking your documents, data, notes, calendars, reminders, passwords, photos, etc. to do an experiment for me.
