Just a warning to everyone, some extra care and actions may need to be taken
with regards to backing up iCloud data. It seems that one cannot restore
iCloud data from a Time Machine backup. iCloud does provide some redundancy
with Apple managing the primary copy of data but if one deletes some iCloud
data by mistake, TM backups may not be as useful as you think.
Let me explain with an example. After moving to Mountain Lion I ended up with
a number of seemingly duplicate Reminders lists in iCloud. As the *reminders*
was not very important I decided to delete the duplicate lists. An hour or so
later I noticed that it did not just delete the list from Reminders, it also
deleted the associated calendars from Calendar with years of past and future
*event* data :-(
Of course, this delete also quickly propagated to my other iCloud clients.
Fortunately, I had a Time Machine backup so I thought I would just restore the
Calendar folder in ~/Library. Firstly, I had trouble restoring the folder
itself (but that seemed to be due to some ACL issues). When I fixed that and
had restored the folder Calendar would not open - I am not sure why exactly but
after searching the Web I found that restores like this generally don't work
for iCloud data.
One of the reasons was that the iCloud data is considered the primary copy of
the data. Any calendars that were restored would have been deleted
automatically by the iCloud service (because, I guess, these calendars would be
older than the current state of the iCloud data). The only way to reinstate
seems to be to create a new calendar and import an exported version of the
previous calendar.
So the suggestion, for Calendar at least, is to regularly export your main
calendars (as .ics files) and save them separately on or your TM backup. I am
not sure but I guess similar applies for other iCloud data (e.g. Contacts?). I
am not even sure how to export collections of Notes or how to recover if I had
accidentally deleted / removed a Notes collection. This is quite a worry
because I use Notes a lot.
Hope this helps some and all the best for 2013!
Cheers,
Ashley.
--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia
mrhatken at mac dot com
Social (Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc.): MrHatken
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