Escaping the iCloud roach motel

You’ve not seen my Daughters’ photo libraries :wink:

2 Likes

I saw an article from Google where it implied (but not outright stated) that their entire infrastructure was audited to DoD standards. Can’t put my hands on the link at the moment, but it’s one of those weasel-y marketing things that could’ve been taken as meaning “our entire cloud” or “our entire government cloud”. My bet is on the latter.

This section talks about auditing stuff.

Nope. Under a standard PEM contract.


Pay Each Month.

Marco Arment made a similar comment on ATP #516

1 Like

Indeed, this certainly seems confirmed by my experience. Apple support failed to call me back so I called them again. I’m scheduled for a follow-up with senior engineers on Monday. This has been a sad and frustrating experience.

I thought CloudKit sync is a lot more robust than simple iCloud sync. This does not explain many issues mentioned in the Update v2: Needing Serious Advice re: Losing Faith in Apple Notes discussion

Sorry, I know next to nothing about how iCloud works and even less about Cloudkit. I have on occasion offered “solutions” that appeared to work for me, at least once.

The article that @R2D2 posted in “ Best Option . . . “ is one of the most informative I have read. I had no idea that iCloud is a database.

It states, "iCloud is one of those features in macOS which works almost all the time for the great majority of users.” I agree, and that’s why I don’t depend on it.

Dang this thread is informative. A heartfelt thank you to all

3 Likes

Per user, right?

Ah yes, I remember getting to the bottom of that and being unwilling to hit that big off switch, given I was already confident it would not work. (Because you can’t get a bigger off switch than wiping and selling the laptop and buying a new one and it still has the same problem.)

My case proved that sometimes it’s really not you and there is nothing you can do about it.

All I can offer is that I was exhilirated when mine started working 842 days after I first reported the issue.

With DEVON, one thing is where you database is stored and other thing is the location of the log data needed to sync between different databases on different devices (that’s the “sync location”). The sync location is not a DEVONthink database, it’s more log of changes. DEVONthink does not have the concept of a “unique database”, every device has its own database on a given local storage and the sync location receives and propagates the changes to the other devices. If there are conflicts, they are resolved locally on each device, in a quick and consistent way. This is a hard problem.

To add some added difficulty, the DEVONthink technical burden is that it predates the era of cloud syncing, and they have to support legacy methods that their user base has come to depend over the years: I can’t remember if I ever used Bonjour or WebDAV since 2003 on any of my Macs. Ever. Yet DEVON supports it and this is probably the reason why they cannot do what EagleFiler, KeepIt! or Notebooks can easily do: just store everything on iCloud Drive and rely on iCloud syncing altogether. Obsidian comes also close, but due to the way Obsidian access its files, to have your files on the Obsidian iOS app, your vaults must be on the dedicated iCloud Obsidian location.

So, to some it up: never store your local .dtBase2 packages on a cloud folder, wherever it may be. Use the syncing method you like (CloudKit worked well and it was fast for me). But also never index iCloud Drive folders or files into your DEVON databases, specially if they have syncing set-up, that’s asking for trouble when iCloud starts “optimizing storage” and other funky things.

3 Likes

Fair. As was mine sans emoji. All I’m saying is that I’ve been close to some of these issues in my line of work. The prevailing thought is that these commercial clouds with government certifications are “super secure”; not true. Generally speaking they’re the same environment(s). And having a certification isn’t relevant if your data isn’t hosted in said environments; ie IL4. Different teams, pricing, business units, support, etc. Could go on but you get the point…

There is a reason apple can’t sort this. These are their essential apps listed today on my iphone. I’m surprised they get any work done at all. :grin:

4 Likes

Yes. That’s the price for a Business Standard Google Workspace account. Business Starter with 30GB is $6.

Storage that can be shared with up to 5 others is available but I don’t know how it works.

:scream_cat:I hope I won’t have to wait that long!

I have reluctantly concluded that I will only use applications that can export my files in plain text, MD, RT and PDF formats. I no longer feel secure putting important information in AN since I can’t trust that the synchronization will stay reliable. I also don’t want to depend on third party apps like Exporter to export my notes. One never knows when it, and similar apps, may be abandoned.

2 Likes

I’ve never had any issues with iCloud Drive, but for what it’s worth, when I decided to stop paying for Dropbox, I moved to Synology Drive and that has worked very nicely for simple file-syncing: the kind of thing we used to use Dropbox for.

My wife and I have several Macs - about three each - syncing one personal folder each and one shared ‘team’ folder between us. The iOS clients mean I can access everything with minimal effort from my iPhone and iPad too - the folders appear in the iOS Files utility, for example.

I have one on-site and one off-site Synology Diskstation, and I can arrange whatever kind of backups I like from either of them. You do, of course, need to have a NAS in the first place, but you then get however much storage you want very cheaply.

Just my tuppence-worth…

Welcome to the fold, my friend.

Soon you may conclude that exporting isn’t enough – what if things go wrong just before you were about to export the most recent changes?

<Darth Vader voice>Come join the plain text cult, @Bmosbacker!</dvv>

Seriously, after maybe a year, I never looked back, and that was more than a decade ago. Nowadays, you can do almost anything in plain text, with only mild sacrifices: simple charts, tables, slide decks – I’ve even found a timeline app, though I haven’t tried it yet.

Happy to expound if it’s ever helpful!

4 Likes

The last time (about 5 years ago) I looked Microsoft and Google had a ton of white papers including some on how they store & protect customer data. If you really want to dig into the subject I found a 74 minute tech talk from 2013:

How Google Backs Up the Internet

2 Likes

I obviously can’t say authoritatively, but I think it varies across providers. For example, in the past GCP leveraged sharding and couldn’t guarantee that data remained inside certain “boundaries”. This was a big problem for some of their larger customers. This was a few years ago and happened prior to some of their recent certifications, but was a huge issue and I believe caused them to at change their stance.

Depending on classification and compliance some clouds are more cloudy (technical term) than others. Some of these clouds are just managed data centers that offer modern devops tools and have cloud consumption models.

Sticking with the Google theme, they’ve been really good about publishing material on SRE, autonomic security, etc. and I think they do redundancy well. Microsoft is much less transparent in my opinion, but also had a different strategy to market. All I know for certain is that these systems are extremely complex; this will lead to failures of greater impact even if infrequently. Again, a lot I don’t know and I can only make assumptions based on what I’ve seen/experienced.

I so disagree with this. All the charts, styling, timeline, linking, etc, are not plain text. They may be using plain text files as their input, but their output is anything but plain text, because plain text does not do those things.

Using plain text sacrifices everything, every bit of processing needed to do something with the text. I see no point in an obsession with plain text when in reality everyone wants rich text with images links and charts and timelines. I appreciate that there are coders out that can do all this and that there are apps that will manipulate plain text, but there is little difference between that and a word-processor it apps like Craft and Bike. Nearly every app will output plain text at a very minimum.

We are in an age where apps do amazing things and people want to stay in a 1980’s text format. I’m so glad for apps like Bike, Craft and Tinderbox.

No offence intended, but having followed the “plain text” hype for five years and found it seriously lacking in nearly every area of tech life and looking for endless workarounds, I’m so glad that we have a wealth of rich text apps.

3 Likes