How do I sync iCloud iWork documents with Lion?

Question

I have been using my iPad with Numbers and would like to be able to just open them up on my Mac with Lion. I can not figure out how to connect/sync to iCloud documents. I have checked iCloud documents for syncing, but my documents don't appear on my Mac. I have even set up my mobile documents folder on the desktop. I can drag files to the iCloud that way, but then I can not open them from that folder. Frustrating.

Answer 1

The following works on Lion 10.7.4:

Warning! If you don't know what you are doing, then you probably shouldn't be doing this. You take all responsibility for nuking your own iCloud data.

• As usual, make sure you have iCloud setup for your user and enable Documents & Data sync.

Execute next steps from Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal):

• run: sudo nano /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ubd.plist - change RunAtLoad from false to true
• run: defaults write com.apple.ubd kUBSyncEnabledKey -bool true

At this point, ubd needs to be restarted..

• run: launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ubd.plist
• run: launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ubd.plist

now ~/Library/Mobile Documents should be synced up.

If for some reason it's still not syncing after step 4, try logging out and back in.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, Macintosh does not (yet) support complete iCloud synchronization for documents. We can only hope that Apple will implement this at some point soon.

In the mean time, go to http://www.icloud.com/ and sign in. You can drag documents to and from the appropriate section on your computer, and it'll work with your iPad. There's still another bug, which involves Mac > Mac syncing, but as long as you just do iPad > Mac or Mac > iPad, it'll work fine. :)

Also, there is a folder located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ which contains your iCloud-enabled apps' data. This includes the iWork suite, but unfortunately iWork documents aren't saved as the normal filetypes (e.g. ".pages"), so they can't be opened on their own.