Cautionary tale about IOS5 and iCloud from someone who made mistakes

If you have multiple iPhone devices being upgraded to IOS5 for the first time, learn, think, and be careful. I will tell you a tale of long avoidable hours...

I upgraded my iPhone first, on the first day of the official IOS5 release.  It went swimmingly.  I only had to restart the upgrade 5 times to get through and I was done.  I switched to syncing with iCloud, syncing some content with my macbook air via wifi; I was really using the features, I felt.

Then, I upgraded my wife's iPhone to IOS5:

1. Started with a sync for a backup
2. I did the upgrade (which also takes a backup - a full one this time I believe)
3. I set it to back up to iCloud (and promptly forgot I did this)
4. Synced with my laptop for a backup (which it was not because of the iCloud setting)
5. set for iCloud sync
6. merged all of my 8 gazillion contacts and hugely numerous calendar items with my own
7. Turned off iCloud sync
8. Deleted all contacts and calendar entries
9. A recovery to the last known backup (related to the upgrade I thought but seemingly no) - still no calendar or contact entries.
10. Resync all contacts and deleted all of my contacts (various times for hours during one day)
11. Manually copied calendar entries from mine (hours during the next day)

You cannot sync the iCloud Photo Stream to and from multiple iPhones and have a separate calendar also synced to iCloud from those phones.  Point learned.  

So in the end we chose separate iCloud accounts and no Photo Stream sharing to each other.