Thursday, April 24, 2014

Backup custom cloud contacts to PC

Many people use a company, university or other custom cloud account (for example, hosted by ownCloud) to sync iPhone contacts and calendar events via the CardDAV or CalDAV protocols.

If you are looking to back up or extract such iPhone contacts and calendar events to your PC, follow the steps from the below demonstration.

Backing up contacts and calendars from custom CardDAV or CalDAV account

1. Download the following program on your computer

2. Start the program and connect your iPhone. Let the iPhone data load

3. Click on "More" (on the top right) then on “Cloud setup”

4. Now it’s time to connect your custom cloud account with the program in order to backup the contacts or calendars contained within the account. To do so, click “New connection” then click “Custom”

5. Enter the account username, password and server address as they appear on the account already set-up on your iPhone

Tip: You can find the account details such as the server address on the iPhone under Settings > Mail, Calendar, Contacts and then tapping on the respective cloud account you wish to connect

6. Ensure that the Contacts, Calendars and/or Reminders options are checked and then click “Add account” and exit from the “Cloud setup” window

7. Now that you connected your cloud account to the PC program, you can freely back up the contacts or calendars from the account to your computer. To back up the contacts, make sure you selected the Contacts icon from the pane on the left. Contacts synced via your custom cloud account will appear with a little globule icon to the right. Finally, click on the “Export selected” button.

You can do the same for calendars. Simply click on the Calendar icon on the left pane, select the cloud calendar and click “Export selected”.

This is the only way I know to backup custom cloud contacts and calendars synced via CardDAV or CalDAV to the computer.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Transfer "On My iPhone" notes to iCloud

Ever synced your local iPhone or iPad notes to iCloud? If you did, you would’ve noticed that the local notes which already existed on the iPhone are kept local while the new noes you add to the iPhone are the ones added to your iCloud account.

So how can you transfer the iPhone notes which were kept locally on your iPhone and which appear under “On My iPhone” to iCloud?

icloud and on my iphone notes in ios 7

Transfer local iPhone notes to iCloud in one go

Here’s how to move your “On My iPhone” notes to iCloud.

1. iCloud will not push the local “On My iPhone” to your online account. Instead, you would need to use a CopyTrans Contacts, a PC program which transfer the notes to iCloud in one go. Download the program from the following link:

button transfer iphone local notes to icloud

2. Start the program on your PC and plug in the iPhone via the USB cable. Click on the Notes icon in the main program window on the left to access the local iPhone notes.

main program window in contacts view

3. You will see a list of the notes which are saved directly on your iPhone within the “On My iPhone” account

local iphone notes listed in main copytrans window

4. Now, connect your iCloud account with the program. To do so, go to the More button on the top right and select “Cloud setup”

connect cloud account

5. Click on “ + New connection” and then click “iCloud”

new connection icloud account in cloud setup window

6. Enter your Apple ID credentials, ensure that the checkmark next to Notes is active and click “Add account”. Finally, exit from the Cloud setup window

window allowing to enter icloud username and password

7. Any notes you have in the iCloud account will appear in the program’s main window at this stage. Notice the small cloud icon to the right of such notes

icloud notes appear listed in program window on pc

8. Now, select all local iPhone notes by ticking the box next to each one of them. Right-click on the selection and click “Move to… > iCloud account”

move on my iphone notes to my icloud account

9. The “On My iPhone” notes are all moved to your iCloud account.

all 6 notes have been moved successfully

This is the only way I know to transfer local iPhone notes to iCloud as regular sync will not do it.