Agreed. I do Time Machine backups and Backblaze as well. My super important files (videos/photos) are on an external drive backed up to both as well.
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Apparently, if you turn off iCloud Drive, then the other stuff (such as app data syncing) gets turned off also. This was recently discussed in Under the Radar (Marco Arment and David Smithās developer podcast). Apparently it is a problem for people who are provisioned with devices by their employers who disable iCloud Drive. All apps which use any of the various iCloud options to sync data donāt work for those people.
Therefore, I would suggest simply moving your documents out of the synced directories but leaving iCloud drive enabled. Those directories can just be left empty and you can store your files elsewhere. Of course, you can specifically disable syncing of the desktop without turning off iCloud drive, so you can still do that.
I think that applies to just about all the options, doesnāt it?
This is what I do. No point turning it off completely, because some apps use it and itās beneficial. But you donāt put more than necessary into a leaky boat. 
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Putting Documents and Desktop in iCloud can be turned off separately from iCloud.
That was the source of some of my irritation: if you turn off iCloud, your Documents and Desktop are saved as an archive folder. If you only turn off Documents & Desktop in iCloud, they are just deleted
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Maybe thereās no need to changeš
As far as syncing, SyncThing works well. It doesnāt store anything in the cloud, only syncs between devices. Itās cross platform, encrypted, etc.
If you also need storage, there are Nextcloud providers so you donāt have to set up your own server. They all seem to be in Europe, and expensive.
Linode has āeasyā setups of Nextcloud servers. As I recall a small shared server is $10/mo for 50GiB. You could also use the server to run a personal website, etc.
I should also point out that Nextcloud offers more than just file sync - it also has apps for notes, tasks, working with OpenOffice, email, collaboration, etc. all through the web interface.
When I recently researched pricing for Dropbox alternatives, I found it to be among the more affordable options. E.g. Box is $10/mo for 100GiB.
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Iāve used iCloud, Dropbox, and OneDrive, and Google Drive is hands down the fastest and most reliable.
Read their privacy policies. They do collect data on you when you use many of their free services but they keep it to themselves. They donāt if you are using their paid services. Google Workspace legal and compliance
Iāve decided if the U.S. Department of Defenseās (DOD) has given them Impact Level 4 (IL4) authorization my data is probably safe with them 
Google Workspace is $12/month for email and 2TB storage.
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Does this refer to a service such as pCloud? Iām really in the dark about all of this stuff though reading with earnest. I have a little bit of stuff there. Why is this dangerous? Thanks
Sorry @WayneG I really wish it was, but trust me when I tell you that this isnāt the way it worksā¦
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Think of it this way.
- Storage costs a provider money on some sort of an ongoing basis. Whether thatās a monthly payment to another provider, consistent replacement of drives in a storage array, or whatever, it costs money.
- Bandwidth moving to and from their company costs them money on a monthly basis, guaranteed.
If a company has monthly bills, and is offering users a one-time fee for ālifetimeā access, in order to be profitable that means the the one-time fee MUST be high enough to cover the entire lifetime of costs.
2 terabytes of storage at the cheapest utility-rate provider Iām aware of (Backblaze B2) costs $10 per month. Dropbox, Apple, and Google are all comparable to that rate, and for that matter so is PCloud if you pay monthly. So at a rate of $399 for ālifetimeā 2 TB, your $399 would pay for a little over 3 years of storage.
In a situation like that, one of these things must be true:
- They somehow figured out how to be a ton more profitable than Backblaze B2, Apple, Google, and Dropbox.
- They arenāt planning to survive past a few years out (ālifetimeā logically means āthe life of the companyā)
- Theyāre intentionally running these ālifetimeā subscriptions at a loss and possibly burning VC money, hoping to get acquired at some point
- Theyāre running some sort of Ponzi scheme where they figure revenue from future customers will pay for current customers
- Theyāve figured out some sneaky way to monetize your data
None of those options are good for you.
There are good companies out there with solid business models. Depending on what youāre doing, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, etc. are all good, viable options by stable companies.
Iād highly suggest you invest in one of them.
And if youāre just doing online backup, IMHO Backblaze Backup canāt be beat for the price.
(EDIT: Edited the bulleted list to not single out PCloud directly.)
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Thank you for such a detailed explanation. It makes great sense. I have used Backblaze for years which includes backing up my own external hard drives. I do no collaboration, only sync between my devices. I got a ādealā on pcloud last year, so my investment isnāt great, but I really appreciate you explaining the business strategy aspect so I am more careful in the future.
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With DSM7 have been incredibly happy with Photos app. The auto upload works well, and option to delete photos from phone after upload is great. It now supported private and group folders, so my wife and I each upload all photos to private are, then we move over the keepers to the shared public folders.
Of note synology released a new photos Apple TV app which is great (and supports videos we uploaded from phone). Photoprism has some cool features but the Apple TV app and ease of use gives me enough to not mess with it.
A possibility, but maybe being a ton more profitable isnāt necessary, just profitable. Theyāre reselling cloud storage like many other companies, and we donāt know the wholesale rates for storage, bandwidth, etc.
Lots of accusations here, without any evidence.
Theyāve been around 9 years and have 16 million users.
Not a Ponzi scheme.
Also not monetizing peoplesā data, as itās encrypted in transit and at rest, GDPR laws, etc.
They need to be profitable enough that, for 3.5 years of their own monthly rate, they can provide what an end user would expect by the term ālifetime 2 TBā. Their own definition of ālifetimeā is ā99 years or the lifetime of the subscriberā.
The fact remains that every company - including themselves - is selling storage at a monthly rate of about $10 for 2 TB. Charging $400 for ālifetime 2 TBā and bundling in all the transfer bandwidth canāt possibly be sustainable unless the current market price of storage from the other cloud providers is massively inflated above the actual costs.
Not necessarily intending to single out PCloud (although I used their name in the example since thatās what we were talking about), but in general this is stuff thatās all happened with other companies in the past.
And of course if you assert that theyāre profitable enough at $400 to provide ālifetime 2 TBā, then none of the other things would have to be true.
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thanks for pointing this out. I did not realised that Synology Photos has a TV app.
do you mean that the Synology Apple TV app is good enough so you are using Synology Photo and NOT Photoprism?
You write very well for a walrus.
Must be tricky with those big flippers.
Thank you.
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Some of their other services seem overpriced to me. For example, the Family Lifetime plan is $595 for 2TiB, which is essentially the same $400 plan with a few more users. On average, adding Bob and the kids isnāt going to add that much demand for bandwidth.
They also have a Family Lifetime plan at $1499 for 10TiB.
They also have an encryption addon for $150 that adds client-side encryption. Seems to be a large profit margin on that.
And, their password manager $29/yr, $149/life.
If I were in need, I might give their monthly or annual plan a try. Their selective synchronization works the way youād think all cloud services would work. Right-click a folder, select Sync, tell it where in your cloud to sync it to. Done. No ~/Library/CloudStorage annoyances.
Yes. The synology photos app is dead simple to set up and the Apple TV app is pretty darn good.
Fair warning I self host WebDAV server for devonthink, Zotero, self host audiobookshelf, Calibre-web, kavita, and paperless-ngx via docker (which takes a bit to learn), And while I can easily host something like photoprism, the synology app is so easy to set up, more than adequate, and most importantly hits that I wife acceptance factor that I run with it. Apple TV app was the cherry on top.
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Yeah, as you mentioned the encryption seems ridiculously priced. They still advertise the vanilla service as AES encrypted, but itās encrypted with keys that they control. So your data is effectively available to their company employees, and anybody else that manages to get the key.
No, but he kids might have 70 some years to go until ālifetimeā runs out. 
All kidding aside, Iām guessing that āfamilyā plans mainly mean that the user is more likely to actually use their entire data cap, because there are more people.
If Iām understanding correctly, thatās actually a pretty slick feature. If Iām understanding correctly, it sounds like they might actually be implementing Appleās document/desktop cloud sync the way Apple should be.
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I didnāt think pCloud was a reseller. Theyāre a low cost operation: about 40 employees with hardware in two data centers (EU and US.) Similar to Backblaze but about a fifth of the headcount.
Paying for four years of cloud storage up front is a pessimistic bet by the user that prices wonāt continue to be driven down. pCloud is an optimistic company.
just installed the Apple TV app. It is surprisingly good. Now I am more incline to send more photos (such as those from DSLR and mirrorless cameras) to my NAS and let Synology Photos deal with them. I intend to remove my Photoprism docker container now as I do not think it would be the same on Apple TV