Merging My Two Apple IDs

Last week I finally got rid of my secondary Apple ID. Having two for different tasks bugged me for a while. The first one I used for purchases on the iTunes Store back in the days and the second one was newly created when MobileMe was brand new. Somehow the newer one turned out to be the one I used for contact and calendar syncing, for backups and all the good stuff that iCloud has to offer these days. In an ideal world, I would only have one Apple ID which does all the jobs.

So, how do I get rid of the additional address? There were three obvious approaches:

1. Create an entirely new Apple ID and use that one from now on.
2. Migrate everything from that @flohei.de address to the @me.com address.
3. Migrate everything from that @me.com address to the @flohei.de address.

Number one did not seem to be best idea as it would involve migrating two addresses instead of just one. So I discarded this idea immediately.

The second choice did not appeal to me since I’d much rather use my own domain’s address instead of the old MobileMe one. Besides, this would require me to transfer all my purchases. Which is, as far as I know, not at all possible at the moment.

Option three would leave my purchase history as is on my @flohei.de account and just migrate all the user data (contacts, calendars, photos, backups, etc.) to the main account. This seemed to be doable.

To be fair, this third option is probably the easiest of all migrations. I didn’t have to worry about my purchases and, to make it even easier, I didn’t care at all about anything but contacts and calendar. My mails are currently with Gmail, instead of Reminders.app I use the great Things by Cultured Code, notes are in Evernote, the Keychain should hopefully fix itself since I planned to keep all the entries on my local machines and Documents and Data were easily migrated manually for my five documents I had on there.

Contacts

The contacts migration was a bit strange. Let me explain the process first. I’ll tell you afterwards why it was strange for me.

The idea was to simply export all the contacts from my address book and just import them after I switched accounts. When exporting, keep in mind that simple vCards do not include your contact photos. The export you’ll probably want is a Contacts Archive¹.

Calendar

Exporting Calenders required me to export every single one of my calendars seperately. Creating an archive of all my calendars resulted in an archive that even contained my Exchange calendars. This was not neccessary, since I didn’t want to change anything on that end.

After I exported all the calendar files I created new, empty ones inside my other account and imported those backups into them. The import and export features of Calendar.app can be found under File as well.

Conclusion

This is most likely not for everyone. I assume though, that there are at least a few out there who might face the same situation. So I hope this encurages you to try it out. It’s not as bad as it might seem in the first place.