Mountain Lion: Should You Store Your Documents on iCloud?

Where should I store my documents? In the cloud? On my hard drive? Both?

Like many of Mountain Lion's new features, iCloud document storage encourages connection between your computer and mobile devices?and encourages you to use the same Apple applications across devices. Apple includes the iCloud service in some of its applications (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) and gives you the option of storing documents created in those programs in the cloud, where any change you make on one device will be reflected on all the others.

iCloud works much more like an application on a smartphone or tablet than one on a traditional desktop computer. On a computer, you can put documents wherever you want?on the desktop, in folders, in folders inside of folders, and so on. But in Apple's iCloud, documents must be grouped by application?Pages text files are kept separate from Keynote presentations, for instance?and folders can't be nested (i.e., a document is either in a single folder or it's not).

Every time you open an application supported by iCloud (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), you're greeted with a window displaying icons of the documents you have in the cloud (you can change views to look at documents stored on your hard drive too). Documents in the cloud look and act like iOS icons; to move two files into a folder together, you drag one icon on top of the other.

When you open or close a document, you get the choice between storing it on your computer or in the cloud. You can choose one and change to the other later, or you can keep one copy in each place. So what should you do? What seems at first to be a simple choice really isn't, because iCloud really isn't a simple cloud-storage system (like Dropbox, Google Drive, and many others). Sure, you can store documents in the iCloud for safekeeping, but if you were to truly use it as a backup, you'd quickly run out of space (Apple gives you 5GB of cloud storage to start; you can pay more to upgrade it). Instead, it's better to use iCloud as a repository for files you frequently have to access and change on various devices?computers, iPads, and smartphones?and rely on external hard drives and cloud-storage services for long-term backup.

If I share an Apple ID with a family member, and we both have iPhones, will messages I send in the Messages application on my computer show up on both our phones?

Yes. As we noted before, with Mountain Lion Apple is pushing hard to get you to use your Apple ID in more and more places?including Messages. The trouble here is that you can share an Apple ID across multiple phone numbers. And if the Apple ID is linked to both of your phones as well as to your computer, these devices all receive any message sent to that ID. That's because Messages, which allows you to send and receive text messages with your Apple ID, shows any message as coming from that ID, not from your specific phone number (since your computer is not associated with a phone number). That makes Messages far less useful than it would be if you had one Apple ID per phone so that each phone number would match up with a single ID.

Although having one Apple ID per iOS device makes sense technically?it's impossible for the computer to choose a phone number without the phone company's intervention?it also makes sense strategically: The more Apple IDs there are, the more potential customers Apple has. Apple IDs feature prominently in Mountain Lion; far more system settings than ever before require you to provide your ID and password?the same information you use to buy and sell apps, music, TV, and more on your mobile devices.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/software/mountain-lion-should-you-store-your-documents-on-icloud-11215098?src=rss

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