If you live in a home with multiple iPhones, iPods and iPads, and you probably run into this problem.
Someone connects a new iPhone to your home computer and loads up a few of their favorite songs and accidentally ends up with your embarrassing voice memos and all of your contacts.
Don't let this happen to you.
I'm Donald Bell and today I'm going to show you how to sync multiple i-devices to one computer while
maintaining a degree of privacy.
The first thing you need to know is that you can avoid a lot of this mess by wirelessly syncing your apps and music and data using iCloud, which is now baked right into iOS.
It used to be that you had to sync your iPhone to a computer just to activate it but that's no longer the case.
So, if you can break the habit of connecting up to your computer, you're gonna be a lot better off.
My second tip for avoiding this mess is to just create multiple user accounts on your Mac or PC.
You can view your iTunes, your husband or wife can have
theirs, everything is kept separate and tidy.
All of that said, if you really wanna sync more than one iPhone or iPad with single iTunes library, here's how to do it.
Now, here's my iTunes library filled with all my media, which my wife mostly hates.
But let's say she's in a hurry and she really wants to get this Bjork album before heading out.
I'm gonna connect your iPhone, watch it pop up in iTunes here on the left, click on it and you'll see a panel of all of the phone settings.
The critical options here are
the first and the last.
We wanna make sure that this is not set up to automatically sync when connected and then we want to enable the ability to manually manage music and videos.
After that, we'll click through on each of these other tabs just to make sure that nothing else is set up to sync.
No contacts, no apps, no podcast, books or photos, none of it.
Then hit apply to make these new settings stick.
Now, this is the first time you tried syncing this device with your iTunes library.
You might get a warning that says the phone was
originally set up to be used with another computer and that you're about to raise this phone and sync it with content from this library.
Some heavy language and if it scares you too much, you can try one of the other techniques I mentioned earlier.
But since what we're really doing here is freeing this thing up to sync media manually and we check that no other apps or info or other settings are being synced to this phone, I'm gonna take the leap.
All right, now that's done, finally, I'm going to locate that Bjork album my wife wants in my iTunes collection here
and manually drag and drop the songs on to the phone icon.
Now, up at the top you can see that they're copying right over.
When I'm all done, I could hit eject and check the phone and I should see that the music are added as right there in the music menu.
So, that's how to sync two phones on one computer while still keeping things like apps and contacts separate.
More iPhone tips, head over to howto.cnet.com.
I'm Donald Bell, thanks for watching.
