iCloud Syncing

With iCloud Syncing, forScore can automatically keep your sheet music library up to date across all of your devices.

Setup

To set up syncing, start with your device that contains the most complete and up-to-date music library. Choose Sync from the Tools menu and tap “Sync with iCloud” to enable it. Next, you’ll have to choose how to handle conflicts with any data already on the server, if applicable: in general, you should choose “Prefer Device Versions” on your primary device, and choose “Prefer iCloud Versions” from other devices that may not yet contain complete copies of your library.

Once you’ve completed syncing from your primary device, repeat these steps on your other devices. Note that your choice to prefer device or iCloud versions of your data is only necessary when enabling syncing—from then on, forScore has enough information to resolve conflicts automatically.

Syncing Content

Syncing happens automatically as you make changes to your library and as efficiently as possible depending on your connection type, server availability, and other factors. Changes are typically synced in less than a minute but may be delayed in some cases; to request that forScore begin syncing immediately, open the Sync panel and drag the view downward until the refresh control starts spinning. Return to this view at any time to see when the last successful sync was completed.

Currently, forScore syncs your music library and content (your sheet music, bookmarks, setlists, metadata, annotations, recordings, and more). Settings are not synced, however, since many people choose to use slightly different configurations on different devices to get the most out of each form factor. Due to privacy considerations, Dashboard data is not currently synced across devices.

Status & Error Messages

As with any network-dependent service, iCloud Syncing sometimes encounters issues that temporarily prevent it from completing its work. This is a normal part of the process and usually resolves itself after a short while. In other cases, syncing may not be able to proceed until you take additional action (in this case you’ll see a red exclamation mark next to the Sync entry in the tools menu).

iCloud Accounts & Storage

forScore uses your personal iCloud account to store its data and keep your content up to date across all devices. For multiple devices to share the same forScore library, they must be logged into the same iCloud account. This feature does not facilitate sharing content between different accounts (even those that use Family Sharing).

Apple’s iCloud service provides different storage plans, and you will not be able to use forScore’s syncing functionality if your account does not have sufficient storage. iCloud accounts, storage plans, and payments are all handled exclusively by Apple.

Backups

forScore stores its synced documents in iCloud, but in a separate location from Apple’s whole-device backups. If you use iCloud Backup to back up your device(s) and you also plan to use forScore’s syncing feature, you may not have sufficient storage space to accommodate both. If needed, forScore can indicate to the system that its documents should no longer be included in future whole-device backups. This increases the risk of data loss, but ensures that only the synced copies of your forScore files exist in iCloud. In this case, it’s imperative that you manually back up your data to a safe, non-synced location in case your data is corrupted or lost. Once a change is synced across your devices, this is the only way to ensure that you can revert to a previous state.

Privacy

All of your data is stored by Apple using your iCloud account and as such is governed by their policies and terms of service. We do not maintain user accounts of any kind, and we do not analyze or share your content with any other party at any time.

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