I appreciate that. I’m really referring to today’s apps rather than yesteryear when export wasn’t so much a thing. Evernote is a slightly different animal as it’s not just text, but it does have export capabilities. With the demise of the ‘old’ Evernote I used Bear and everything exported fine.
Has anyone managed to turn off iCloud completely and use another system to keep all their data in sync across multiple macs and iOS/ipadOS?
I haven’t. I keep all my cloud files, contacts, email, calendar, many of my notes, and some of my tasks on Google Drive. But I still need iCloud to sync apps like Drafts, Reminders, and Due, etc.
And occasionally I need iCloud because G Drive isn’t always available on all share sheets. So I have to drop files on iCloud and use Hazel to move the file to my Mac or G Drive.
IMO there is no advantage to turning off iCloud completely. Pick what works for you from all the services/apps you have available.
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In the later 1990s and early 2000s I used MS Word on both Mac and a Windows machines.
A decade or so later, when I needed to get at some of these documents and no longer had ready access to one of the platforms, it was incredibly difficult to open or convert some of the documents.
I did eventually. But it was a real problem and meant a lot of effort, time and frustration. A small number of files were damaged or corrupted in the process (though IRRC, I was able to piece them together).
At another point in my career I met a lawyer who had done adoption cases. He had suddenly realized that he had countless documents for years past he couldn’t easily access – they were on floppy disks in a format for software he no longer had access to. Solvable? Sure, but a major headache.
MS Word and Microsoft are alive and well, of course. So it doesn’t take the sudden disappearance of an app for this to be a problem. You just need some time to pass, and to fail to be absolutely meticulous about carrying past data forward into new media and formats (when it may not even occur to you that you’ll need it). I’d rather spend my time and energy on other things.
And as I said, I haven’t found the plain-text approach to be particularly limiting – in fact, it helps me focus on the content instead of the bells and whistles.
If it doesn’t work for you, don’t do it. But please don’t dismiss the problems other people have had with proprietary or unreadable formats as inconsequential.
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If pCloud didn’t have a subscription portion of to their revenue model I would be a lot more hesitant to put my data there. What happens when the ‘one-time’ renew can’t pay the bills and the system shuts down/goes out of business. You might not have access to your data.
Personally my preference is to self host as much as I can. But that isn’t the most convenient solution.
Paul
I would agree with you that pulling data from archives decades old can be an issue. And I certainly would not want to dismiss problems people have in trying to gain access from what are now unreadable formats. I’ve had that problem myself with Quarkxpress and Indesign. If I came across as dismissive, I do apologise.
However, I don’t believe this is a proprietary file format issue it’s an archiving issue. My problems with having files in formats from applications I no longer use made me realise that I need a robust archiving procedure.
Ten years ago I updated all my Microsoft Word documents to the latest format, some 2,000 plus documents. Any file that goes in archive is now either updated at regular periods or a PDF version is created. I believe an archive procedure is as crucial as a backup plan.
There are other ways to keeping data accessible that does not involve everything being in plain text and they certainly don’t take any more effort that trying to keep everything in plain text. Plain text is an option but by no means the only one.
I apologise that this has hijacked the thread, so this will be my last comment in this thread about the issue.
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This is exactly what I seek to avoid by sticking to plain text as much as possible!
P.S. Check out all of the so-called “archive” versions of PDF that now exist!
https://www.pdftron.com/blog/pdfa-format/how-to-pick-right-version-of-pdfa/
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in a personal note, please don’t. These discussions always shine some insights.
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I’m glad I’ve never needed anything except PDF 1.3. The same version Apple has used on the Mac for the last decade or two.
I would echo exactly this. Being able to share your opinion, discourse, disagreement are all part of a strong culture. In fact, I usually know something is off when the politics of politeness takes over and everyone politely agrees or avoids conflict. It’s how people disagree — and how they repair when they mistep and lose their cool — that matters. I learn the most when folks share differing viewpoints or else we risk groupthink. Think about it: all the apps we’re here to discuss would vanish if we all thought the same and we’d all be forced to only use Obsidian. 
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That’s funny! 
…
There’s a big dose of irony in that statement! At one stage a year or two ago I really thought a NAS would be ‘the thing’ I needed to sort out my storage needs. Until I saw the prices!
I don’t have high needs beyond just bulk storage, so I think it’s going to be a lottery win before I buy a Synology.
There’s so much more meaning in that clause than perhaps you even intended. “Plain text” is a misnomer anyway!
If only writing in basic English, then it’ll probably work for a long time. Using any language with accented characters, or “smart” punctuation or other-than-basic symbols? That can get to be fun.
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You point out a real problem. There are too many alphabets. Too many character encodings. Too many standards. The web took its best shot and standardized on UTF-8. All the programmers I ever worked with had already standardized on ASCII (all right, some had standardized on EBCDIC 
), at least as a mental model, a way to cope, even when forced to make their software work with DOS graphics characters, Windows code pages, and multi-byte characters. Plain text, the ideal of plain text, is how many of us attempt to cope today with a complicated world where there is no real solution to the problem of future-proofed writing.
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Exactly, we can redo it if necessary
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FWIW, if you’re still fighting the “local storage” dragon, I got a QNAP TR-004U DAS, not NAS. The “U” is the rackmount model, and the “rack tax” is about $100 or so over the consumer version, which is just over $200:
It’ll happily take 8 TB drives which you can usually pick up for around $160 each. RAID 5 from 4 8 TB drives gives you 24 TB of space, for an “all in” of between $800 and $900.
It doesn’t do all the cool NAS things, but plug it into an old Mac and let the Mac do the NAS-y things and have a huge storage array with some built-in redundancy.
Just a thought.
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Which is why I have to budget time to convert ll my old documents et al into the new format any time I upgrade my major system. One reason I am still running on a 2013 iMac
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The historian in me agrees but its not so easy to design or implement.
Thanks. I had looked at RAID enclosures, but not this one. Does it allow you to expand over time by replacing drives with larger ones?
Practically speaking, no.
Yes, you can add disks over time. But those disks would be independent volumes. So if you put an 8 TB in there now, and added another one next month, you’d have 2 8 TB volumes. Probably not what you want.
For my setup I had a couple of existing 8 TB enclosures that I shucked and pulled the drives out of, and I bought the box + 2 more 8 TB drives. I set it all up at the same time.
Theoretically if you wanted to completely change your volume structure you’d have to pull all the data off, set up the volume again with the new drive, then put your data back. Which gets impractical when you’re talking about terabytes of data.
