Redundant backups? Did you also have a SuperDuper and Backblaze backup?
I really enjoyed that Churchill speech and the profundity of the statement is what led me to escape the land of everything buckets. Thus, from the Servers in Data Centers across the globe to the Mac on my desk in Los Angeles an āiron curtainā has descended from the cloud keeping me safe from Everything Buckets.
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Yeah, had a Backblaze backup which I āinheritedā on the new Mac via their application. Still need to update my bootable backupā¦
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I gave keep it 3 months of use in 2019. Wanted to love it, donāt need anything as powerful as devonthink; but consistent sync issues and regularly lost data was just too much, went back to Devon and recently upgraded and could not be happier, have never had a single lost item.
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To @ismhās earlier point about all roads leading to Evernote: DEVONthink is better Evernote than Evernote.
Iām still hoping Bear suits my needs. Ask me again when Iām not on vacation and actually have to use it for work.
I tried using Bear for research before but it didnāt last. Itās clearly designed for writing, not storing research and it does not have an interface geared towards organising and storing PDFs - it felt like I was not using the right tool for the job.
Iāve never found anything as well suited as DEVONthink, although I have to customise it a lot to make the interface simple and clean. When a lot of the sidebars/unnecessary toolbar items are removed it can become a clean-looking and more importantly capable tool that is clearly designed for this purpose. I found that ruthlessly stripping it down to only have the features I use was easy and only took and hour or so. Having the powerful OCR and web clipper make it worth the time, and the AppleScript support is unrivalled, I use it in lots of automations with Folder Actions.
Iām looking forward to them improving the iOS app this year, but even that works well when you need to quickly access and annotate research.
Itās also nice to know that export is as easy as dragging a file or folder out of the app. I also had the awful experience of using Evernote and trying to move things out.
I think EN is much worse than DEVONthink, especially on iOS where PDFs are shown as icons inside notes. It means switching between saved PDFs has an extra step every time I want to open another one. As a researcher this slowed down my workflow a lot.
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Thanks for making this Mac Pro log. Iāll do a bit of vicarious living through that.
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Same as I do for Shawnās Jeep page that inspired mine
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Itās a bummer that the included drive is so loud! You mentioned on episode #517 that youāll reach out to Promise to see if your drive is defective. Iād be curious to know their response. My guess is that itās just the nature of spinning drives to be loud and we have to deal with it.
I also have a J2i on the way. Thought about returning it and purchasing the OWC Accelsior 4M2, but that top right corner has limited use otherwise, and I think I can use KM to mount and unmount as necessary.
Yep, thatās pretty much what they said.
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Gross.
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā
Thereās an amusing response to this in the first five minutes of the latest Connected:
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It genuinely caught me off guard.
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So odd about the heat (some fun, some not) youāre getting for this.
Iām enjoying living vicariously through your new Mac Pro experience. And maybe some further-down-the-road Macintosh desktop machines will include trickle-down Mac Pro 2019 tech ā¦ its modularity, in a smaller form factor, would be grand.
One can dream, anyway.
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Apple customers are like this up and down the ladder. I got some remarks for getting the AirPods Pro so close to launch day, and have for having HomePods, and Iāve expressed bewilderment at people making 8GB phones work, and then here I am gawking at the Mac Pro buyers. Itās kind of like that Carlin adage about the people driving slower and faster than you both being crazy/foolish. 
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The Synology may run Linux underneath the hood, but you donāt need to even know that since you can use GUI to point and click to do most things that you need to do, just like Droboās and QNAPās.
Besides ease of use, hot swappable drives that automatically rebuild themselves, I really like their SHR RAID format as it lets you get the most space when you have different sized drives in your array.
You can go pretty crazy with installing apps and network services on it, but I have an app server (ubuntu) with Docker containers for that.
The minus with a NAS is that backups are expensive if you have a lot of data. Iām at around 25TB of data now, but I just started learning Final Cut Pro , so Iām sure Iām going to add a lot of video content to storage soon. A DAS or just a locally attached drive can be backed up offsite for $5/month with Backblaze.
As far as what storage solution is right for each person, well, it depends on their requirements and preferences. I thought about using my iMac to share file on my network, but it doesnāt have SHR , I canāt upgrade or add network cards to get more network throughput . Those were important to me, so I stuck with Synology.
Presumably thereās a future episode entitled āMac Tower Usersā with special guest John Siracusa.
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