Years ago there was a rumor where it was said that Apple could offer the opportunity to merge two accounts of Apple into one, good news for all those users who by some slip have two accounts and all their data spread between them.
Unfortunately, it is something that was not possible to do at that time or even today. But there is a simple solution: to migrate everything we have in these two accounts to one and to depend on it while ignoring the other. Getting it is relatively easy, but you have to take into account a number of factors.
The golden rule: keep the account where you have your purchases
The most normal thing is that, as a result of the confusion over the nomenclatures that Apple has used, you have an account that you use for iCloud and another account for your purchases that you call “the iTunes account”. Surprise: both are the same. They are Apple accounts, and both can be used both to synchronize data with iCloud and to acquire content.
The only downside is that we can not transfer purchases from one Apple account to another, so when choosing which Apple account we’re left with, it’s best to stay with what we have made those purchases and thus avoid having spent money to nothing.
If on the other hand, we have purchased in both accounts, there is another solution: keep one of them but configure both Apple accounts in a family so that at least you can share the purchases of the other account.
Data migration? Export, invite or share
The other obstacle we must overcome is: how do I move the data from one account to another from the same Mac (and in turn synchronize everything to iOS devices) if I can only log in with a single account? in preferences?
The answer is to configure the computer with the Apple account with which we want to stay, to then log in with the other Apple account through the iCloud.com website and a browser. From there we can export data such as contacts in the calendar, and download photographs or files that we have stored in iCloud Drive.
Another way we have to pass data such as calendars is to share it in an iCloud account configured with an iCloud Family setting, as we have said before, or invite an Apple account to access them to copy and save them as we want.
Very important: remember to leave everything locked with a key
If this change of accounts involves changing the iCloud settings of your iPhone and/or iPad, remember: you must log out of your old iCloud account and log in to the new one in all those dispositions. Also, before doing so, you have to verify that Searching for my iPhone is disabled so there is no conflict of authorizations between the two accounts.
Finally, we must remember to delete the record of all Apple devices that we have in the iCloud account that we stop using. For that we will have to access the settings section of the iCloud website and, in the list of devices below, click on those devices and remove them from the list.
