Dan Moren writes about a bizarre 12-hour iCloud meltdown on his account. Doesn’t seem like much has changed since 2016 when I blogged that iCloud is too opaque. I still prefer Dropbox for everything important.
@manton Yikes. I rely on iCloud probably too much. For me it has “just worked” most of the time over the years. If I lost access to Apple Notes for hours, though, I’d be distressed enough to start looking at other solutions.
@manton Also good post back in ‘16. True, how iCloud manages photos and notes is too complex for me, opaque like you said.
I value the “tangible” or visible plain text file approach, which is one benefit of Obsidian for notes, for example. But for sync, you must choose a service. I recall iCloud or Obsidian’s own service as options. Curious if DropBox is supported.
@manton I've had horrible luck with Notes / iCloud sync -- files not syncing, not deleting, disappearing, reappearing, disappearing again, and so on. After a great deal of logging out of iCloud, deleting, having files reappear, re-delete, reappear I gave up. It seemed to be syncing, but I could no longer trust Notes with anything important.
@manton @isaiah Yup, I switched from Evernote to Apple Notes because I don't trust Evernote to survive.
But the syncing of Notes across devices is very hit and miss: some days it's instant, other days it takes hours. Quitting and relaunching Notes seems to make no difference. Oh yes please for a manual sync button.
I've never trusted iCloud drive, and I've been using it since .Mac, MobileMe etc.
@robbirming That's a bummer. I think I still pay for iTunes Match and I'm afraid to cancel it because maybe it is keeping the whole thing glued together. Although mostly just use Spotify now.
@manton Issues like this are why I'm grateful Backblaze exists.
I recently tested syncing a single image for TIL with iCloud and it reacted as if I'd thrown at it a collection of those high-resolution images taken by NASA. This was just for between the M1 iMac and iPhone, on a stable connection with no other items being actively saved. That's both the beginning and end of me trusting Apple for important syncing.
@SimonWoods Yeah, great reminder that even when everything syncs, it's no substitute for an extra "real" backup.