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   iOS 8 Users: Do Not Upgrade to iCloud Drive

   Adam C. Engst

   Prominent among Apple's WWDC announcements for iOS 8 and OS X 10.10
   Yosemite was iCloud Drive, designed in part to bring iCloud's
   previously document- and app-specific storage capabilities back into
   plain view in the Finder ('[1]Apple Unveils iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite at
   WWDC,' 2 June 2014). With iCloud Drive, Apple is hearkening back to
   iDisk, a feature of iCloud's predecessors MobileMe, .Mac, and iTools
   that provided online storage that looked and worked like a normal
   (though slow) drive in the Finder.

   But there's a problem. Actually, there are three problems. Apple hasn't
   officially released Yosemite yet, iCloud Drive doesn't work in 10.9
   Mavericks, and upgrading your iCloud account to use iCloud Drive in iOS
   8 is a one-way street ' once you upgrade, you can't go back to the old
   document- and app-specific approach that's compatible with Mavericks.
   So when iOS 8 asks you to upgrade to iCloud Drive, tap Not Now.

   If you were to enable iCloud Drive, and use it for storing documents,
   you wouldn't be able to see those documents on a Mac running Mavericks.
   Upgrading to iCloud Drive reportedly moves your data to different
   servers (and probably rearranges it to boot), so I'm guessing that
   Mavericks simply has no idea where to look for it.

   Beyond the basic inability to access iCloud-stored documents on the
   Mac, this limitation also prevents you from working on iCloud-stored
   documents on both an iOS device and a Mac. So, if you're a fan of
   switching back and forth between Pages on your iPad and on your iMac,
   you really want to postpone upgrading to iCloud Drive until Yosemite
   ships.

   Less obvious is that numerous developers rely on iCloud behind the
   scenes to keep iOS and Mac versions of an app in sync. A number of
   developers are now warning users not to turn on iCloud Drive because it
   will prevent their iOS apps from communicating with the Mac versions
   still running under Mavericks. [2]The DayOne journaling app is in this
   situation, and its developer, Bloom, has put together a simple flow
   chart to illustrate what you should do. [3]Realmac Software has also
   issued a similar warning for users of its Clear to-do and reminders
   app.

   [4][tn_DayOne-warning.jpg]

   Of course, you could upgrade your Mac to the public beta of Yosemite,
   but since it really is a beta, there's no guarantee that everything
   will work as expected (if you do want to explore this option, be sure
   to read '[5]'Take Control of Beta Testing Yosemite' Says It All,' 24
   July 2014). Importantly, although developers have been using the beta
   versions of Yosemite to test their apps, they may not have released the
   necessary updates to enable iCloud Drive for their Mac versions.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/14804
   2. https://dayone.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203197460
   3. http://help.realmacsoftware.com/hc/en-us/articles/200737812
   4. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-09/DayOne-warning.png
   5. http://tidbits.com/article/14939

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