I don't have another syncing solution to what you want other than what Apple provides, but I'm not saying there isn't one. I too am very concerned about what data I put out over the web. But I think there is a point of trying to be too protective and making things too difficult. If you continue to upgrade the OS for new services, then at some point you will have to give in and use the new technology and learn how to be secure as you can with it.

You must realize that every time you send someone over the internet that it is in the cloud somewheres. Every email or transaction you made is stored somewhere.

Every time you are connected to the internet, you are vunerable to being hacked, even though you are behind a firewall. Using iCloud is no more dangerous than being on the internet or being loged into mail. POP accounts are just as vunerable to attacks as IMAP. Remove important emails from the server and move them to local folders which will remove them from the server. The article from Steve referring to the guy that got hacked is a bit vague. That guy left his account vunerable. If he had not enabled the Find My Mac in iCloud, his devices could not have been wiped clean or hacked. It is a useful feature for mobile devices, but Apple needs to redo some features of it to where people can't gain access to it without additional password info. The fact that his gmail account got deleted is because he had it associated with the Apple ID. You do not have to associated you other email accounts with your Apple ID. I'm sure Apple will address the issue and make changes.





The only data you can store in iCloud is Contacts, Calendars & Reminders, Bookmarks, Notes, and Photos. Documents & Data are only documents for Apple products such as iWorks. You just can't upload files from your computer for storage. Anything you don't want in iCloud can be unchecked. For .me email, that's up to you whether or not you want to use it. It is nothing more than an IMAP account. Your other accounts will have nothing to do with the iCloud storage other than what address you associate with your Apple ID.





My suggestion is one you probably won't like, but it is to go ahead and enable iCloud. Unless you have sensitive data in your Address Book or Calendars or Notes, then it shouldn't be a big deal even if someone does hack your Apple ID provided you take the time to configure it securely. Since you have 6 Apple devices, it would be the most convinient and trouble free way to sync basic information between devices.

I did not see anything other than Notes that iTunes can't sync, so you can continue to use iTunes in conjunction with iCloud to sync only Notes, although I don't see any advantage of that except for music.





If you think you will have better luck with Windows, then that's OK too. However, do you really think you will be more secure with them?