How do I sync iCloud iWork documents with Lion?

Unfortunately, Macintosh does not (yet) support complete iCloud synchronization for documents. We can only hope that Apple will implement this at some point soon.

In the mean time, go to http://www.icloud.com/ and sign in. You can drag documents to and from the appropriate section on your computer, and it'll work with your iPad. There's still another bug, which involves Mac > Mac syncing, but as long as you just do iPad > Mac or Mac > iPad, it'll work fine. :)

Also, there is a folder located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ which contains your iCloud-enabled apps' data. This includes the iWork suite, but unfortunately iWork documents aren't saved as the normal filetypes (e.g. ".pages"), so they can't be opened on their own.

The following works on Lion 10.7.4:

Warning! If you don't know what you are doing, then you probably shouldn't be doing this. You take all responsibility for nuking your own iCloud data.

• As usual, make sure you have iCloud setup for your user and enable Documents & Data sync.

Execute next steps from Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal):

• run: sudo nano /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ubd.plist - change RunAtLoad from false to true
• run: defaults write com.apple.ubd kUBSyncEnabledKey -bool true

At this point, ubd needs to be restarted..

• run: launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ubd.plist
• run: launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.ubd.plist

now ~/Library/Mobile Documents should be synced up.

If for some reason it's still not syncing after step 4, try logging out and back in.