DECEMBER 2019 MACWORLD 145This situation can emerge as you switch
from iTunes to iCloud sync in iOS. In Settings
→ [your name] → iCloud → Photos, when you
tap the iCloud Photos switch to turn it on, you
may see the message, “Photos sync from
iTunes will be removed.” (Make sure at this
step that you truly have copies of all those
images, because proceeding will irreversibly
delete them from your iPhone or iPad.)
Tap to remove them. At this point,
iCloud Photos should start its sync.
However, some people will see the error,
“iCloud Photos could not be turned on. Try
again later.”
Waiting doesn’t typically help. Instead,
you have to tweak some iTunes settings
to proceed:
- Connect your iOS device to your
computer via USB. - In iTunes, switch to the photos
settings. Uncheck any selected photo album. - Sync.
Now you should be able to complete
turning iCloud Photos on.RECOVER MESSAGES FROM A
DELETED MAIL ACCOUNT IN
MAIL FOR MACOS
Sometimes you make a rookie mistake, like
shutting down a hosted email account
before you—well, before I—download all
the messages that are stored on the server
and synced to my Macs and iOS devices
via IMAP. I felt like a dope. I had already
contacted the mail hosting company, which
retains deleted accounts for seven days for
just this reason, when I realized I should
have a full backup cached on my iMac.
This Mac is always on and the Mail app
is always running. The account I’d just
deleted should be fully synced with the
cached download in Mail, so long as I
didn’t restart my Mac or even quit Mail. If
you quit or restart, it’s hard to know exactly
what cached content would be temporarily
deleted by Mail or macOS.
If the email account is already offline,
as mine was, the Mail app will balk when
you try to copy or move messages within
its interface. Instead, you have to find the
cached and downloaded mailboxes in
your home directory. (Did you delete the
account and messages weren’t cached? If
you have a Time Machine backup, you can
recover mail from that via instructions in
this column from last year [go.macworld.