It’s possible it could be something else, but it seems most likely that the problem is coming from Ulysses, CloudKit, or Ulysses’s implementation of CloudKit.
If it’s purely a CloudKit issue, it makes all apps that rely on it suspect. If it’s a bug in Ulysses or its implementation of CloudKit, it’s a major one and the blame clearly lies with Ulysses.
I actually found @Bmosbacker’s reaction remarkably calm and measured, given that his entire book in progress disappeared from the app he was using to write it. Few people react that calmly to potentially catastrophic data loss.
Fortunately he had multiple backups, but when that kind of thing happens it seems reasonable to stop trusting the app until the cause is identified and fixed.
I’m sure there is, but his reaction could still have been one of the variations on “Ulysses is garbage and its devs are idiots” that you typically see online.
@Synchronicity@MevetS Thank you for the kind words. If you’ll pardon my spiritual comment, my “laidback” nature is due only to God’s work in my life. I know what I’m like apart from that grace and prior to it!
Yes, but I export them monthly to DEVONthink as plain text files and to another folder, both locations are also backed up. In short, I like and use AN, but I don’t trust it, thus my export habit. I may also need to export any future Ulysses work to external folders as well.
Everyday after reviewing my Daily Note from the day before, I copy the text of that note from the NotePlan app and append it to an annual notes text file in BBEdit. At the end of the year I copy that annual notes document into my EagleFiler everything bucket app. One can never be too careful with one’s valued data.
So one thing I’m still confused by: were you able to restore the content to Ulysses from any of your own backups outside the app? If so, which backup saved you? And did you restore the files to Ulysses, or did you put them elsewhere for now?
Because I was running Ulysses concurrently with Scrivener and Pages for the book project (I was experimenting with what app I wanted to settle on for long, complex writing projects), I did not need to restore from backups. I’m confident that I could have restored from BackBlaze.
Given this experience, I moved the book project exclusively to Scrivener. I dislike using Dropbox and Scrivener’s mobile app, which, while usable for focused writing, lacks feature parity. That said, Scrivener is a feature-rich, stable application with no subscription. It has robust export features, and, like Ulysses, one can use external folders and write in markdown. The silver lining in what happened with Ulysses is that it forced me to decide.
This is a good move … but I think you would be making a mistake if you stop using Macbook version of Scrivener. Is not the book more important than over-worrying the technology? Use both iOS Scrivener and macOS Scrivener. I have for years. Just works.
Indeed, using Scrivener will impact this my one month iPad experiment. Uysses has near parity between the Mac and iOS versions making it easier to rely on the iPad for writing. That is the main reason I was using it.
You did not bother to restore your backup data to Ulysses and you seem uninterested in pushing the Ulysses support team to find an underlying cause of the failure you experienced. Hmm… It sure seems like you were ready to step away from the Ulysses app and used this incident to do so.
So, I can stop wondering whether Ulysses is an unreliable app or whether CloudKit sync has some hidden fatal flaw.
Not at all. I just don’t have time for all of the troubleshooting. I have a 30 chapter book to complete.
I don’t know what happened with my content. I’m not suggesting that Ulysses is unreliable. It seems reliable for the majority of those who have used it for decades. Each person will have to decide what he or she thinks about its reliability versus other options. Again, I only created this post to inquire if others have experienced this problem. My motive was not to critique Ulysses as an app or its developers.
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