PC Doctor July 1, 2016

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Dear PC Doctor:

I signed up for iCloud but I am not enjoying it.  Every day, I get messages on my phone and in my e-mail that I am running out of storage and should upgrade.  I decided to back up to a flash drive instead.  How can I cancel my iCloud account?

Thanks,

     Sam

Dear Sam:

To cancel your iCloud account, first go to Settings>iCloud on your device and confirm that everything is turned to Off, and that you are not syncing any data with iCloud before proceeding.  (If you are, when you delete the data from iCloud it will also be deleted from your device and it will be lost.)

Go to your computer, open System Preferences, go to iCloud, and choose Sign Out.  You will get an alert, asking if you really want to delete the account.

To be sure you want to delete the account, you may want to see what items you have stored in your iCloud.  To do this, press Cancel and select the Documents and Data option. If you are using iWork for your documents this will show you that your documents are stored in iCloud, and you can choose to email them to yourself or transfer them to your computer through iTunes.

You will also see an alert that reads:  “Photo Stream photos stored in iCloud will be deleted from this device.”  Photo Stream is a feature that uses iCloud to send any photos you take to all of your devices, where they stay for thirty days.  It is not the same as your camera roll.

Before continuing, check whether or not you have Photo Stream turned on. If, under your iCloud Settings it says Photo Stream is turned off, you can ignore part of that alert.  If you have Photo Stream on, you will want to check to see if the Photo Stream photos are actually saved in your Camera Roll. It is always better to double-check than to be sorry.  Photo Stream albums are NOT permanently stored on your device. If the photos you want to keep are in your Camera Roll, great! However, if the pictures in Photo Stream and Shared Photo Stream are not on your device and you want them permanently stored on your device, you can save them by tapping on the Share Button (the one with a square that has an arrow pointing up). From here you can either choose to email yourself the pictures or save as many as you want to your Camera Roll. If you are satisfied that you have all of the pictures you want, return to your computer, open System Preferences, go to iCloud, and choose Sign Out.  The daily messages from iCloud should stop.

Until next time,

Happy Computing!

     PC Doctor