[dm3]

I consider myself technical, but when recently faced with a task of backing up contacts from an iPad to iCloud - I got scared.

The iPad had an iCloud account set up. It was unrelated to the current device's owner, so I couldn't back the device up to that account. There is a 'Remove account' button, but what's going to happen when I remove the account? Is something going to disappear from the iPad? How am I going to know?

I figured I should back up to the Mac first, then switch to the new iCloud account and restore if anything happened. I didn't even do that, because the last backup of contacts from the iPad got lost (probably because there was another iPad sync'ed with the same Mac) and I wasn't sure what would happen when I sync'ed it this time.

Maybe technical users tend to overthink these things, but data loss does happen and the current Mac's ecosystem is indeed confusing in that regard.

[Angostura]

Similarly, I consider myself technical but the whole iCloud syncing business on iOS and OS X Lion (may have improved in ML) is a mess and I managed to lose documents. Syncing has to be turned on and off in multiple places with non-intuitive descriptions of what may happen.

Turning syncing off warns that data will be lost (huh? I don't want you to delete anything, just stop syncing the two data sets).

Tis all a muddle.

And then backup. You have to choose between backing up to this computer and backing up to iCloud? Why? I certainly don't trust iCloud with my only backup, but having it as a remote adjunct would be handy. Why can't I back up to both?

It's horrible.

[rkudeshi]

There is one way to back up to both iCloud and your computer. First, set up automatic iCloud backup. Then, whenever you plug in your iOS device, right-click on its name in the iTunes sidebar and hit 'backup'. It will do a one-time backup to your computer.

It's not perfect, but it works really well for me. Daily automated backups to the cloud + backups on my computer whenever I update the OS or upgrade devices.