581: “Work” Flows with Stephen and David

I’m suggesting that it would be nice if a nice, Apple-designed app could provide that service. If they focused on it, the app could actually give you helpful status updates and such. :smiley:

Probably not much of a market for that though.

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If it makes you feel any better, your iCloud data is probably not in a single datacenter. It’s (hopefully) being replicated to at least one other DC that’s geographically separated by a significant distance to protect against natural disaster, power and connectivity loss, etc.

But iCloud is really more of a sync service than true backup.

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I suspect many never think about backups, if they are like most iPhone users.

An iPad has been my primary computer for the past few years and I currently use a Mac mini as a server for storage and backups. (iPad to cloud to Mac to Backblaze, etc).

But what happens when my Mac is no longer available? I could buy a PC for $300 and duplicate my current system in a couple of hours. (It doesn’t make sense to spend $1200+ on another Mac just to backup an iPad). And I don’t like relying on an unattended computer when I travel. So I too would like Apple to make it possible to run real backups from an iPad.

Right now my backup plan is to sync my photos and videos to Google as well as iCloud. And to manually copy my files from the iPad, & iCloud, to G Drive as well as to a couple of SanDisk external drives. Hopefully the asteroid won’t hit both data centers.

Allowing an app to do true backup would be my first choice. But it would be enough for me if Apple allowed a Shortcut to copy the files. I put the odds of either happening at slim to none.

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Your comment makes me think that the iPad could really stand to gain an equivalent of menu bar apps, so that something like Backblaze could be doing its thing in the background without user input. This could also open the door for services like TextExpander, etc. to run system wide. Apple would have to rethink the whole sandboxing model for this to work, which is a direction it might not want to go, but it could be something that would delineate iPadOS from iOS.

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Nice episode! There is just one workflow @MacSparky @ismh forgot to discuss: the workflow that enables you to rapidly test and move your data from app to app. How do you do it? Any general tips? I know that app-hopping can be a problem for some, but there may also be listeners at the other end of the spectrum–stuck in outdated apps and unsure how to proceed–and how to prevent falling behind in the future. Perhaps this is really another episode, but it’a a part of your workflow that I’ve always wondered about.

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The segment on OmniGraffle with the @MacSparky blog post got me interested. But… $249 for the Mac version and $12.49 for the iOS??? That’s way out of the ballpark for us mere mortals who want to use it for dealing with a lot of personal (one-user, non-collaborative) uses. I wonder if they’ve considered having a version directed towards the single-user, i.e. a personal version? I might be willing to pay something well under $100 (or maybe a subscription in the $5-10 range for a Mac/iOS package). As it is, there are free and low-cost apps that will do this reasonably well. Of course, maybe OmniGroup is saying, “We know that. Use them and come to us if you really want to work with the big kid on the block!”

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Thanks, Alec, for clarifying. But now I’m more worried about an environmental disaster with all those datacenters replicating all my photos of dogs. But they are cute dogs though so…

@tonycr

I get that. I should have made some alternative recommendations. I pay for OG because I use it to build graphics for the day (and night) jobs, so I already had it.

I agree with the sentiment, but think it’s helpful to differentiate between the iCloud sync and the iCloud backups for iOS devices. iPad backups aren’t subject to the same foibles that the iCloud file sync is, as they’re written once and “etched in stone”, so to speak. No ongoing changes.

The question is, of course, what’s in those backups. It’s definitely not everything on the iPad, so worth knowing what’s protected and what’s not. :slight_smile:

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Hmm this is of course relevant. But I highly doubt that all my documents in iCloud Drive all of my 15000 photos and videos in Photos are in those backups. But I don’t know?

I’m not being critical. I fully understand your use case. I just would like to see a personal version at a reasonable price for “non-professionals.”

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I would assume the iCloud Drive documents aren’t in the backups, but any data that’s just on the iPad (app data) is in the backups. And I think the apps get to define what data of theirs is part of that or not. Overcast, for example, doesn’t get the podcast downloads backed up because somehow the iPad gets the message that the downloads can be re-acquired from the Internet.

It’s a mess. :slight_smile:

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FYI:

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You mentioned in this episode that right clicking on an OmniFocus Project or Task gets you a link that you can put into other apps. Awesome! However, it isn’t working consistently for me. If I put the link onto a Trello card and click on it, I am taken to OmniFocus. But if I put it into a field in my legal case management software, Clio, and click on it, I get an error. I tested it with the same link. They are both browser based apps. What am I doing wrong here?

And if the ENTIRE EARTH IS DESTROYED, what then? What about that, smart guy?!

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Well, eventually, the whole universe will collapse into nothing. So

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You don’t have off-planet backups in addition to off-site?

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Personally, I send my off-planet backups through the Stargate. :ringer_planet:

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My iPad lists my Google Drive in the left-hand column of my Files app.

I’m loving my free account in Airtable.com as the platform for your excellent Kanban Personal Project Status Board idea. You mentioned Airtable as an alternative. And there’s a lot you can do with an Airtable Kanban card, since Airtable allows URL links among its great many optional data field types in any of its relational tables. And the Kanban cards in Airtable are drag and drop. Plus, by viewing Airtable in a full-screen instance of Safari, I have full control over the image size of the Kanban webpage display. And, being web-based, the Airtable Kanban Board works as well on my iPad as it does on the Mac.

And if you want to convert the Status Board from personal to team, you can add up to 9 team members to Airtable for free, so long as you don’t exceed the 1,200 record limit.

So, why reject Airtable for OmniGraffle?

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