Back To My Mac and iCloud ID

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Level 1

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Back To My Mac and iCloud ID

I would like to remotely manage my parent's Mac from my Mac in a different city. However, in testing this, the only way I could seem to get it to work was if I left myself logged in to their Mac. That seems like quite a limitation, making the functionality useless for remote management. Perhaps the intent of the feature is strictly to allow you to log on to your Mac, for instance, from work, as long as you have left yourself logged in at home (e.g. perhaps the Mac is sleeping).

Can anyone confirm for me if this is in fact a limitation? Documentation seems to indicate it, but the definition of being logged in was not clear to me.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 5, 2015 2:31 PM

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Answer 1

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Winston Churchill

Level 10

122,487 points

Oct 6, 2015 2:15 PM in response to BrettSo

Yes, that's how it is, you need to be using the same Apple ID to log into both macs. I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way but I would of thought the name of the feature told you what it did. 😉

Back to MY Mac.

It sounds like you want Remote Desktop.

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Answer 2

BrettSo Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 6, 2015 2:19 PM in response to Winston Churchill

Thanks for the confirmation WC. In this case, they are both my macs and I installed them both using my Apple-ID/iCloud-ID. The limitation there is that I have to have a session actively logged in on both machines for it to work (various web logs indicate that this is not in fact the case, but...).

As with many things Apple for me, that part wasn't necessarily intuitive for me. In retrospect, yep, the limitation makes sense - especially given the price.

Given that Remote Desktop costs money, perhaps I will try Teamviewer first.

Thanks again for your response.

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