Tutorial: Merge two AppleID/iCloud accounts (Apps and Notes)

This is for a situation where you have two different AppleID/iCloud accounts and you wish to merge them. For example one may be a personal account on your laptop and there may be a different, work account on your phone, as I do.

This process won’t technically ‘merge’ the two accounts into one, (though this would be a nice feature for apple to introduce 😉 With this process, you decide which account you wish to continue using and which account you wish to discard, then you copy the data you want from the account to be discarded, into the account you are keeping and then continue to use that newly updated account on all devices.

This took me a while to work out, even after researching I wasn’t able to find an answer. Then I happened to work out this very simple process and I wondered why I didn’t try it before;

*You will be doing this work on your laptop/computer.

1. Firstly open Notes, then go to Notes / Preferences.
2. Ensure that the ‘Enable the On My Mac Account’ is ticked.
3. Now in Notes, under the heading in the left hand pane ‘On My Mac’ right-click and select ‘New Folder’. Name it something like Old_iCloud_Notes.
4. Ensure that you are currently signed into your Mac with your old appleID, the one you plan to discard. To check/sign out in if needed, go to Settings / iCloud / Sign Out.
5. In notes, if you have changed account, you may need to wait a short while for the iCloud notes to populate.
6. Select all of your iCloud notes, by clicking the Notes title underneath iCloud, then click the top Note and then CMD+A on the keyboard to select all.
7. Now with all of your notes highlighted, drag them into your newly created folder, which is under the On my Mac account. Your notes will be moved, not copied from iCloud onto your local Mac.
8. You can’t move any notes which are shared. In case you get this warning, scroll through your list of notes and look for the small shared icon to the left to the note title, then un-share it. The try to move the notes again.
9. Once the move is complete, you need to sign out of iCloud again as listed in step 4, then sign back in with your account that you are keeping.
10. Allow time for the iCloud account to populate.
11. Select all of your notes under ‘On My Mac’ / Old_iCloud_Notes, then drag and drop them into your iCloud / Notes section.
12. With this process, all of your notes are moved from the old account to the new/keeping account.
13. You may instead want to keep them in a separate folder, but still under your iCloud account.
    * You can also move notes via your phone, by clicking Edit, then selecting the notes and then ‘Move / Move all’, but I find a laptop easier.

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Once that part is out of the way, the other major thing you will want to do is transfer your app purchases/books/podcasts etc, this process is pretty simple.

1. In iTunes go to Account \ Sign out. Then Sign in with your old account that you will be discarding.
2. Go to Account \ Authorisations \ Authorise this computer. You may need to enter your AppleID pwd.
3. Go to Account \ Purchased.
4. Click the button ‘Not in my library’.
5. Go to Account \ Check for Available Downloads.
6. In the bottom-right, click ‘Download All’.
7. The downloading part may take some time depending on how many apps you have. You can check the progress by clicking the down-arrow at the top-right of iTunes.
8. If you only want some of your apps from this account, then individually download the ones you want by clicking the app icon.
9. Once all downloads are complete, go to Account \ Sign Out. Account \ Sign in. Sign in with your new account that you are keeping.
10. You may need to go to Account \ Authorisations \ Authorise this computer, if you haven’t previously done so.
11. On your phone/ipad if you are signed in with the account you will be discarding, now switch to your new account…
12. In Settings, click your AppleID at the top of the list. Scroll to the bottom and hit Sign Out.
13. Select Sign out from iCloud and Store.
14. Enter your AppleID password to turn off Find my iPhone.
15. When prompted, select save a copy of the data you want to, such as contacts, safari, or all.
16. Once signed out, click ‘Sign in to your Phone’.
17. Enter your AppleID login and pwd of your new account that you are keeping.
18. Now connect your phone/ipad to your laptop and click Sync. All of your newly downloaded apps from your old account will now sync across to your phone. You will now have all of the apps your your phone that you have ever downloaded with both appleID accounts.
19. Once Sync is complete, you can eject your phone/ipad and use all of the apps as normal, and also access your notes from both accounts combined.

I thought I would share this process that I worked out, since I had done a bit of research and wasn't able to find a solution for migrating Notes anywhere. Hopefully this will help some other users 🙂

NB. Apple has a policy in place whereby you can’t use the an email address as a new AppleID if the address has previously been used by anyone as an AppleID, even if the email has been disconnected from the previous account completely. So my advice, decide to keep the account with the email address that you prefer to use and migrate all of the data to that account, because you can’t swap the email/login ID over at at later date.~ PoeticKinetics