Occasionally family members will end up using the same ID, often kids with parents, but there comes a time when the child has grown up and it is time for them to get their own account. You may be selling, giving away, recycling or donating a device and want to make sure none of your data is on it.

Delete your iCloud email on an IOS Device

To delete your iCloud email from an IOS device you will first want to go into the I then scroll until you see iCloud. You will press delete and then you will want to go through the warnings and make sure you have backed up your data and pictures. If you mean delete iCloud activation lock, you may want to learn iCloud unlock buddy - a tool for this purpose.

Delete your iCloud email on a MAC OS

For you Mac computer you will want to go into the System Preferences and select iCloud, then you will want to hit the button to sign out. Next you will have some warnings and you will want to make sure you have backed up your data and pictures.

After you hit delete you will get some alerts and warnings they are the same for the IOS device and MAC OS

You will next get a series of alerts starting with one that warns; If you delete your account all documents and Photo Stream photos will sorted in iCloud will be deleted from this device.

If at this point you realize maybe you don’t want to just delete everything or you want to make sure you have backed up all of your important stuff you can hit cancel and then select the Documents and Data option. You will find that a lot of games store bits of data which you will find in your Documents and Data, you don’t really need to worry about that, but if you use iWork you will likely have documents stored that you can now email to yourself so that you have a backup of those documents which you can use iTunes to transfer them to your computer or another device.

Next we recommend checking to see if Photo Stream is on and to do this you go into your settings and look at Photo Stream if this is off you have nothing to worry about, if this is on you will want to find out what kind of Photo Stream you have on. Photo Stream has an option for a Personal Photo Stream or Shared Photo Stream. If you have the Shared Photo Stream on or both Shared and Personal you will want to make sure that you email yourself any photos that have been shared with you. You don’t have to worry if you only have a Personal Photo Stream of if you have Photo Stream turned off.

Now that you have confirmed you have everything you want go ahead and go back to settings, scroll to iCloud and delete.

Now that you have finished the steps to confirm you want to remove your documents and iCloud Photo Streams you will get the next warning which asks you about removing contacts, calendars, reminders and Safari data. As long as you have backed up everything you want you will go ahead and tell your device or computer that you want to delete the information. If you find you need the data later you will still be able to get it by logging into that iCloud account.

You should now be able to put a new iCloud account on the device or computer, but there is a warning. Not all of the data is really gone and someone savvy with data recover could recover your information. To make sure that you have really erased all of the bits of data from your device or computer you will need to use an app or software to actually remove all of those bits of data permanently.