entry12

[ironicbadger]

It all started when I erased the hard drive on my old 2012 MacBook Pro, because I gave it to a friend for Christmas. However, I didn’t think to sign out of my Apple ID / iCloud first. Shortly after I erased the disk, I started getting prompts on my iPhone X to sign in to iCloud again. When I would try to sign in, it would tell me my Apple ID is not active, so I couldn’t sign in. I called apple and they straightened me out. I promptly deleted that MacBook Pro from my iCloud account just for good measure. Shortly after that, the problem came back! After 4 more calls to apple, I’m still locked out of my account and they can’t reactivate it. Thankfully, I’m still able to use my phone, and I was able to get the files and notes that I kept in iCloud Drive on to local storage since they were already downloaded to my devices. Now I’m stuck with a phone that will never be able to be resold because if I try to sign out of my Apple ID to disable Find My, it will throw and error about this Apple ID not being active.

This all has lead me to want to back up all of my photos and files on my own storage. Thankfully all my photos were stored on my phone and not the cloud, but now I want to get something like NextCloud set up on my Ubuntu server (running on an old Lenovo Thinkpad) so I can back up photos and self host my files, instead of relying on services like drop box. If it could happen with apple, it could happen with any host.