Hi all - I am gingerly trying to migrate all of my iCloud content from one Apple ID to another. It’s not pretty, and I am paranoid that I’m going to lose something.
Contacts were straightforward, as was Notes - Mostly a matter of just having the apps show both accounts and then drag and drop everything from one account to the other.
Messages is a little messed up - When I jump into a long-running conversation, I appear as a different person to the other participants, and they see the conversation split. I think I fixed that by making sure both accounts are added to the conversation instead of just posting from the new account (the device doesn’t seems to see this as an issue, but my corespondents sure do).
Currently, I’m hoping to migrate my Photos library over. I turned off “Optimize Mac Storage” in the hopes that all the files would be on the computer. I gave that a couple of days to sync, then went to turn off “iCloud Photos” and got the message: 1 low-resolution item will be removed from this Mac. Full-resolution versions will remain in iCloud.
I’m not sure what this means. I don’t want anything removed from my Mac, I want it removed from iCloud. I don’t care if a low res item is removed if the full res item is on my Mac, but the dialog doesn’t make this clear.
I would appreciate advice from anyone who has gone through this. I’ll probably come back to this thread when I move on to the next category of iCloud data…
(btw the account I’m moving everything to is the one with all the purchased content, so no issues there)
I just read that shared photo albums will have to be recreated once I move to the new Apple Account… Is there an easy way to do this, like adding the new account to the shared album before migrating? Or is the album inextricably linked to the creator account, and dies with it?
I have the same question about what photos and videos get deleted when you try to merge (in my case turning on ICloud Photos for my wife to sync her phone and updated computer). The dialogue is very vague that “X will be deleted” and that will raise anxiety.
I also thought there was a way to download everything to local Mac, but don’t remember how to do it. It would be nice for backups (and I think it had something to do with CCC)
Yeah, my main problem is that everything seems to be handled separately, and a little differently. It would be great if there were some kind of master migration tool for this kind of thing, but Apple obviously isn’t interested, and it’s not worth a developer’s time as the demand is probably low.
I think I have a handle on it, but I don’t know what I don’t know! It’s like driving into the desert and not knowing that I’ll need to fill up the gas tank sometime.
On the plus side, the “from” account isn’t going away, so I won’t lose anything, I think. Messages will be messed up, for sure. I’ll probably get a bunch of “who dis?” messages once I’m using the new account.
