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Does anyone know if there is a way to disable iCloud for documents only? (I am using DropBox and would like all my documents to be in the same place).

I am using Mountain Lion and in my prefs there is an iCloud section where I can untick "Documents & Data". But what's the data part? I only want to disable iCloud documents.

Hope someone can help/clarify.

Thanks :-)

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1 Answer

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Having Documents & Data active doesn't mean that your documents get saved to iCloud. Some applications might choose to store settings and data that could be shared between your devices. If you disable Documents & Data you disable this possibility.

You can always check your iCloud account if there are any documents already saved. Go to 'System Preferences -> iCloudand clickManage`. You can here see what applications that are using the storage.

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You can see that in my case I have documents from Pages and TextEdit. I have chosen to save them there. It's not anything that your computer do automatically.

I'm myself also using Dropbox for documents but I really see no reason to deactivate iCloud Documents & Data

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Thanks very much for the thorough answer :) What I am annonyed about is that some programs default to saving in iCloud, so if I could turn off iCloud document storage my guess is that default behaviour would change. Do you know what the Data in "Documents & Data" stands for? – rassom Aug 13 '12 at 7:10
If you disable the Documents & Data you wont have the options to save there as I wrote. Also applications like TextEdit will open a blank document instead of an "Open file" dialog. The Data part is what I wrote above as well - Some application can chose to store settings and small amount of data that could be shared to your iPhone, iPad or another Mac you are using. So far I haven't used any application that do this in OS X so it shouldn't matter if you disable the Documents & Data in iCloud settings. – Hoshts Aug 13 '12 at 8:35
Great - thank you very much :) – rassom Aug 13 '12 at 12:15

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