Inside iCloud: Apple's new Documents & Data cloud service - Page 3

As sirozha already said, you are still saving the pdf file, there goes your NDA and your disk storage space. And if your strategy is to save storage space by only keeping the pdf versions of your documents around (because they are smaller than the .pages documents), nobody stops you from deleting these duplicates you created.


Obviously you don't care about other people, if a new feature helps a significant group of other people but does not help you (and even slightly inconvenience you), then it clearly is nonsense for you. Good luck trying to elicit goodwill with that attitude.


And don't you think people who create multiple versions of 1.2 GB documents are smart enough to buy their storage from other places than Apple because it is cheaper there (and thus do not help Apple's bottom line)? Ah, wait their are people like you who do create 1.2 GB documents, so maybe my assumption was wrong.

But you know what your fundamental problem is? You run a business on applications but spend more energy complaining that the world is coming to an end than actually just finding the most efficient solution for your needs. If Lion's feature versioning feature is slowing you down noticeably why are you still on Lion? Or why are you still on Pages 4.1 (and not back to Pages 4.0.5)?

Hmm, I was referring to the general trend I'm seeing lately within Lion, Apple apps (like Final Cut X) and the iOS -- it feels like they're trying to dumb everything down so far that their products become less useful for more advanced users. Not that I want to tweak every little aspect of my system to my own personal standards. If I wanted that I'd get a PC and deal with the headaches that come with it. But prior to recent software releases/announcements I feel Apple has done a far better job walking the line between offering more advanced options and keeping it simple. And I know I'm not the only one who's concerned. Other longtime users have also mentioned they feel Apple may be treading to far on the wrong side of that line with recent choices.

But I am slightly confused by your comment about Apple taking nothing away from existing options. I'm guessing you mean I will still have the choice on my Mac about where I keep my files. And only IF I choose to use iCloud there may be certain requirements added regarding storage location. But if I don't like it, don't use it, right? You know, I can probably live with that for those files I want to have access to on all devices - assuming the program I create them in gets updated to work with iCloud storage. However, Apple is removing quite a few features from their current offerings within MobileMe as they roll out iCloud. Specifically in relation to iDisk, which, in relation to the Documents & Data feature of iCloud has the most parity. Since it basically sounds like we won't have the ability to throw whatever files we want to access into this 5GB of online storage my choices are immediately restricted. Unless I missed something that space will only be available to apps that use the doc&data API to access a sandboxed chuck of our iCloud space. Which means, for example, if I want to quickly upload a file (custom installer dmg's, some system file or zipped folder, etc.) that I'd like to share with a friend the way I can in iDisk now I'm outta luck. It's an awesome feature I've used numerous times with co-workers, friends, and family. They might not understand how to upload and share the file but they don't have to. They click the link I send via email or IM and their download begins. This could be considered a power user feature, though it's pretty easy to use, which Apple is removing in their quest for simplicity. Why not keep it as an additional charge feature instead of killing it off entirely? That's a single example but I think it illustrates the only point I'm really trying to make here: my faith is shaken a bit in Apple in that they used to make their development choices in view of what's best for everyone rather than just treating us all like the least technically savvy user.

Any service or product that is not successful will eventually be terminated. And that applies to MobileMe here. That is not taking away stuff from advanced users, that is adjusting to the market.

Dropbox had beaten iDisk so decisively (both in terms of market share as in features and performance) there was no point in keeping it around (unless it had some strategic value). That is the point, Apple is not discontinuing a service for which there is no replacement. There is a replacement, Dropbox, and it is better than iDisk. They are discontinuing a service that had lost its relevance, its only real value was that it was bundled with other services.

@ PhilBoogie

Top Gear UK is still my favorite show on either side of the pond.



MobileMe gets a lot of flack for it's debut weekend where the system slowed to a crawl because they migrated everyone at once, while also releasing the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 at the same time. After that fateful weekend it was running pretty smoothly but the damage was done.

That said I think MobileMe's worst aspect has always been iDisk. It was not revamped from the .Mac days to use the delta encoding tech they had designed for Time Machine that would have made it sync faster and allow for versioning like Dropbox. It didn't seem to gain any performance either.

I say this as a fan of MobileMe who has always felt the $65/year (no need to pay the full $99 to Apple) was well worth the money for its utility.

Agreed. The flack over MobileMe was mostly due to the jacked roll out of the service and not it's performance over the years afterwards. My only major complaint with the service was the slow performance of iDisk. That's it. To kill this great product is a real shame. Enhancements? Great! But iCloud takes away much more than it ads. In many ways I'd prefer to pay $65 a year and keep MobileMe.

You're in Yosemite, too?

I heard rumors another fell over but the info I received from a ranger was the discovery and removal of one of the 3 bodies from weeks prior.

Actually it was both. Many folks didn't find it slow at all but most of the rest that did felt it was okay performance if it was a free service. Just not a paid one. The two went hand in hand.




Oh really. And where did you get that detail.

Or are you just assuming that Apple will use the same T&C that many other services do that says that anything you host with them is there's to use or even delete as they see fit and you give up all claims including copyright.

Close, but no cigar. You are confusing advanced users with those who think they are advanced. The computer is a tool to do tasks for us. So why are these "advanced users" advocating that Apple still makes us do mundane tasks such as versioning and file management? Advanced technology should disappear and let you do your work, not computer maintenance. iCloud and auto-save is doing just that - doing file maintenance tasks for us. Actual advanced users realize this and can adapt to emerging technologies where, if you don't fight them - they'll make your computing easier.

The people are fighting this are reminiscent of those in the early 80's who fought the GUI - "apple is just dumbing things down for novices - the GUI is not a serious way to do computing; it's not for businesses." Sound familiar?

There is also a lot of incorrect assumptions surrounding this feature. If you learn how it works then you'll learn how and where your data is stored and it won't be the security risk that a certain poster in this thread assumed it was. No more than it was in Snow Leopard anyway.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a third party.

It is a condition of using iTunes and the various connected services that you must have a valid form of payment on file before you can buy anything. Even if the cost is zero. They allow you for a limited time in the beginning to have no payment on your account and only get free items but once you put up a form of payment you must keep it valid and up to date. that's the rules. If you go back and read the T&C that you agreed to without reading the first time you'll see it spelled out in full for you. That you didn't bother to read it the first time isn't the Support teams fault or something they have to let you get around.



You use Versions to go back to a good version of that document or that area of the document and you restore that good version and keep on working.

I understand that it is a shared drive type service and removing a file on one machine removes it for them all, but *I* didn't remove the file. I copied it to the dropbox folder, confirmed that i could see it on my phone, then the laptop said it synced dropbox and suddenly the file was gone from both.

I did not know about the recovery though. Maybe I will give it another try.

You don't like it. That doesn't make it idiotic. What is perhaps idiotic is that you don't seem to have done your homework and read up on Lion and its features and the implications before you upgraded. Which is on you, not Apple



Who live to constantly bitch and moan that Apple has done something not the way they would do it and aren't doing what they think Apple should do. ANd who are in fact a very small minority of actual users.

You don't like it, fine. Suggesting you go back to Snow Leopard and avoid all of this is a valid comment. Here's another valid comment. Don't use iWork. Go buy a copy of Microsoft Office 2011 which works on Lion but currently doesn't support AutoSave etc and simply never update it. Then you never have to deal with this issue

I heard dozens of people complain about idisk, and people i trust, but i never had an issue with it over something like 8 years of use, though it was slow.

I am trying dropbox again just because everyone seems to love it. Maybe the stars where just pissed off that day...

I am also considering idrive, but mostly i plan on waiting to see how the Apple cloud shakes out.

I still don't get it. The fact that you experiment on a named file, trust yourself not to save it, and blame Versions for not losing it, seems a little odd.

Autosave has not destroyed data. It has saved a version that you would rather not have kept. Yes, it now requires that you choose the actual document, not the scribble one that you experimented with under the same name.

If it's really so inconvenient, why don't you give your scribble versions names? Say, "YXZ TEMP," instead of XYZ? I think that's how most of us worked before versioning was invented.

That's the first good, solid suggestion received in this forum, thank you. We are in the process of packing up ~60-some new MacBook Airs we purchased for return to Apple. We're going back to SL 10.6.6 - 10.6.8 until such time as Apple deems it suitable to return some level of user control to their new OS. Don't care much for all the nannying & bossin' around delivered by Lion.

thanks again, have a great weekend (or what's left of it anyway! :-)

What kind of contracts take up over a gig of space?? Are they for people's souls?

Very funny, actually. But not as dramatic as you might imagine. Sometimes, they can be 100-140 pages, double-sided, and contain hundreds of photographs (property, etc.), maps, survey data, charts, tables, embedded floatation contracts, et al.

Markus 4711 on the Apple Discussion boards found a way to delete versions:

He enabled the root user with Directory Utility, logged into Terminal as root and did a

cd /
rm -Rf .DocumentRevisions-V100

I tried this, and it works. It's SUPER HANDY to have!

Now, work needs to be done on getting Auto Save information cleaned up. Apps supporting auto save apparently store new documents in ~/Library/Containers/<app specific folder>/Data/Library/Autosave Information/<untitled doc name>.

This folder can get quite HUGE, depending on how much work has been done. One of our admins had 27GB socked away here. This is not good... it wasn't so bad for her system (yet), she works on a new iMac with a TB drive. But geesh, if you had an 11" MacBook Air with a little drive, this would not be an optimal situation.

I knew if questions got asked & research was done, there had to be a way to get around this crapola & eventually, it would get discovered. Mac Pros are damn smart people - if there's a way, they'll find it. Despite little assistance here, I thought I'd return and post this, in case others may also need some help with these "features."

There's a number of hiccups in Lion; auto-save + versions are but two of them... they need a lot more work & thought to make them viable document assistants.

The ability to OPT OUT would be a wonderful thing to receive from Apple but I truly doubt this will ever be forthcoming. I think Auto-Save, Versions & iCloud are part and parcel of a strategic revenue plan by Apple - Auto-Save & Versions create the demand, iCloud fulfills it.

Kind of like selling fire insurance while you're holding a flame thrower

The iCloud beta was to some extent utilizing Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3.

I'm not sure if Apple will take this approach in the consumer release, but it would be smart if they did.

That way if Apple's infrastructure can't handle the load being placed on it Apple can instantly lean on these mature cloud platforms.

I'm glad you took it that way because that was my intention. If a "feature" causes problems in your workflow, then by all means disable or choose something else. Everybody has their own individual needs.

Paranoid. Case closed.

I, for one, am very impressed with auto-save and versions. Many a time have I heard screams coming from my wife's office when Word would crash and take down pages of unsaved work. As soon as Apple releases the new iWork, which I'm hoping in the next month, I'm buying it and migrating from MS Office to iWork. I've already used auto-save and versions with TextEdit and with Preview (on fillable form PDFs), and I love this new way.

Good. Be happy. Nobody wants to take away your candy. Use it. Enjoy it. But don't disparage others who don't want what they consider to be the destructive editing of these new "features" in their workflow. I am not the only person who finds these functions troublesome, there are new Apple Scripts appearing all over the net to delete versions &/or trim "Auto-Slave," as so many people are calling it now.

This in no way prohibits you from using these functions nor is it meant to limit you in any way.

There was no reason for you to reply to my posts in the manner in which you did. It was both surprising and distasteful, and helped no one. Slamming a "feature" of an OS (inanimate object) and slamming an individual are two completely different things.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

I always say: Relax, you can now get great taste in a decaffeinated coffee :-)

That is the first obvious attack vector, I could have told you that. The question was only whether this is permanent or whether you have to repeat that hourly (and thus would need at least a cron job for it) and more importantly whether something gets screwed up or data get lost. Unless somebody tried this out, I was reluctant to suggest it.


And does this stuff get deleted once you close or save the document(s) that were the origin of this? If not this would a simple bug, there is no reason for the OS to store data that have no handle (file name) to get back to them. And if this was only unsaved work, somebody was hugely reckless, having 27 GB of unsaved work that could disappear with something as simple as a power cut (even if most of that 27 GB was copies of existing data).


Which is why anybody currently using Lion, a point zero release at this point, for anything important is playing with fire at his own risk. Even John Siracusa, the person who wrote the most in-depth review of Lion (80+ pages when printed) does not intend to switch to it for next couple of months, for his private computer.

Not that I would not have suggested to you already multiple times to revert to a version of iWork that does not have versions. Unfortunately, that solution would be so simple that even acknowledging it would have been an admission that you were not actually looking for a simple solution.

Well stated. I think the people who made these decisions are learning from their mistakes.

I think by & large, Lion is a good OS. I think our IT team leapt before they looked. There's a lot of back-pedaling goin' on

I think Apple wants to merge & meld their mobile with their legacy desktop/laptop ecosystems. And that's ok, as long as they deliver the wherewithal to keep working (so far, a mixed bag, as you have noted)... and for heaven's sake, cease pretending a 27" iMac is just like a cell phone.

Auto-save has been a feature of a great-many applications for probably at least 15 years. Of course, possibly the first really perfectly working implementation has been on iOS (not least because it was mandated for all apps).
But I fail to see what auto-save (or versions), your two biggest points of contention, have anything to do with a cell phone, as both precede, in various implementations, the modern smartphone.

You are the one who set the tone - accusing Apple of gobbling up your disk space and then fulfilling the demand with their "expensive" iCloud service plans. Both claims are ridiculous. Instead of trying to understand the concepts behind the new way, you are all over this forum slandering Apple. Apple owes you nothing. You don't like the new way to manage versions, stick with the old OS. You don't like iWork, go to Microsoft Office for Mac. You don't like Macs, go to Windows 7. I am not disparaging you, I am seeing a person who is high strung over the edge. Please don't start shooting people because you think Apple is out to get you personally. You need to cool off and read your posts again. You have anger management issues, you should acknowledge the problem and try to calm down.

Sirozha wrote: "...you must be too old for the innovations that came with Lion."

Yeah, yeah, I'm sooooo friggin' old, you're so fresh & new & totally cool but... you're not disparaging me in the least.

Do you mean innovations or the many bugs in the .0 version? C'mon, man, I'm just trying to live with other people's decisions & get on with my work. Looking for help among the many brainiacs supposedly here on Apple Insider.

Step outta the way & let some light shine thru, will ya PUHLEEZE?

Sweet boy. Thanks for being there at the help desk.

I believe we all forget how long it takes for a project to come together, and people still fuss when others complain that they sue because someone else has infringed in their long developed thought's and ideas.

I am however surprised how Apple, such a large company, be continuously capable of rethinking a product over and over modifying it each time for new standards.

I dread Documents and Data.

I have over 2,000 files, most of them iWork, and they are organized into folders.

For example, I have a Funerals folder. It contains 17 folders with a name that contains the name of the person and the date of the funeral, so they are sorted in chronological order. Each of those folders contains the various files that were used in that particular funeral. For example, the "Smith 2009-08" folder might contain the funeral bulletin, the scripture readings, the eulogy, and a jpeg picture of the deceased. Each of the 17 folders contains similar but unique documents.

As I understand it, iCloud won't respect my filing system. It will gleefully dump all of my documents into one undifferentiated heap, forcing me to recreate my file system by manually grouping things. It will be like the LaunchPad chaos, but several orders of magnitude worse. Even worse than that, related and supporting files that are not in iWork formats will have to be in completely different locations. How am I supposed to find anything in that mess?

I urgently need a way to preemptively turn Documents and Data off before it creates apocalyptic chaos. SugarSync is still the superior way for me to sync files, because it respects me.

This is either a very messy feature for very messy people with very few files, or it's very badly explained.

Haven't experienced iCloud yet, but I'm with you on SugarSync all the way so far. Organized pretty logically and not taking much hands on management.

(Well, not all the way, actually. SS is supposed to allow easy photo sharing of read access to my full-size photo folders, but that feature and the way I've nested and organized my photo albums haven't gotten along at all yet in my few tests.)

But I don't want apple to dictate my filesystem. And I want my iDisk, full of non standard files, to be synced. Is that gonna work?

Amen! I have thousands of files with my company data, and I want to keep it organised the way I like.