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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Stop putting your work directly on a network share? Maybe I'm weird but for 20+ years I always used network shares for backups, or sharing of data. Never to store my live work, that's always on my local disk. Why else have a local disk?

People put way too much trust in these computers. It feels like we're learning the same lessons over and over again. If you had to put your trust in 1) your local disk, or 2) a cloud service, then local disk always wins. Common sense.

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That's not at all common sense. People that use multiple devices may want to put everything in the cloud service so as to access the same version on all devices.

This is what Syncthing is for: everything stays on your local file system, but different local file systems are kept in sync.

Plot twist: I get far more sync conflicts with SyncThing than I do with iCloud Drive.

Granted, I’m using SyncThing between 3 different OS platforms.

Syncthing has pretty basic conflict resolution and depends on the devices being online at the time of the conflict, so that's expected. It does, however, keep everything on the file system, and even allow you to move files to a trash rather than completely deleting them if they're deleted on another device. Hasn't saved my ass yet but maybe one day it will.

I'm confused by the doubling down here, the bigs all sell cloud storage for precisely this use case. Syncthing might certainly well be better, but I've never heard of it, and billions have heard of iCloud.

It's besides the point: it's certainly not indicative of whether or not it's common sense that iCloud intends to sync documents.

I'm not really doubling down on anything. I personally used Syncthing to keep two computers in sync while I was transitioning to a new one. Paying for cloud storage would have been unnecessary in my case. I did have iCloud before that, but I can't access that anymore ever since my Mac broke.

I do pay for cloud storage to sync my reMarkable 2, mostly because they'll void my warranty if I don't.

Malware built into iOS makes it impossible to install Syncthing[0], which is a problem for most of the people who use iCloud tp sync their files.

[0] https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102

> People that use multiple devices may want to put everything in the cloud

Those people may learn the hard way that deleting documents on one device syncs that deletion to other devices in the same way that making changes to a document on one device syncs the changes to other devices.

Yes, I call that sharing. You're going about it the wrong way, putting your live work on a network share instead of copying your finished work to a network share when you want to share it.

Syncthing is also a good option but people have mixed experiences with that.

Local disks fail, and backups suck to restore, it takes time, and it's time you never planned on spending at the moment.

Buy/build a NAS, fill it with SSD's, run raid10, run fast networking, and then back the NAS up to the cloud, use the NAS for hot data. That way, when a drive fails, you swap in a new one, and forget about it, no downtime, no BS.

If your choice is between cloud and local disk, you've already failed.

Raid 1 is probably enough for most if you are backing up to cloud.

True, but it's also not as reliable on SSD's as people think, because they will tend to run out of write endurance nearly simultaneously. Still protects you from actual failures, which is nice, but, far from bulletproof.

Not as much of an issue with HDD's, but, you also need many HDD's to achieve the real world performance of even a single SSD and that gets expensive in terms of drive cost and power usage.

For my setup I use HDD's. I am rarely dumping huge amounts of data which needs to go in a hurry. My network is 1gbit which is slower than SATA 2 anyways.

I guess YMMV based on how fancy a setup you need.

Devices are just an interface for a lot of people, they might use dozens of devices during the period we (nerds) own a single computer. From borrowing their friends tablet, to changing their phone, to using a computer at a library or their office, they don't have a stable local disk. The cloud is far more stable.

I agree with you but we seem old men screaming at the clouds.

Let's meet halfway: use rclone sync to get the cloud up to date with your local data.

And, when out of alpha, you can also use rclone bisync.

Or Dropbox and choose "online only".

For my off site backup I have a computer which syncs everything to local storage. I guess I don't defend against malicious intent or "delete it all" software bugs but that tends to end up as en exercise in insanity.

Storing directly on Dropbox is 5x time slower than on 'normal' filessystem.

Which is why I treat my computer as a thin client unless it is in the Dropbox folder.

For example, every single line of code is simply a scratchpad if I don't sync it to a remote git instance.

iCloud isn't a "network share", it's a cloud-synced folder with attached services. And copying files to either isn't "backups."

You don't actively collaborate on anything with anyone?

You've never worked at an org where the network shares are snapshotted and backed up, but desktops aren't?

My mom is 70 and for as long as the app comes loaded on her phone, she'll never learn this lesson. She doesn't even begin to have enough understanding about stuff like this to be skeptical about it. There have to be protections in place for her, and people like her who are likely to believe anything a company claims without ever reading the fine print.

Your advice is valid if you are an employee at a cloud service. If I was better at managing hard drives than Dropbox and Apple, my job applications wouldn’t be rejected.

iCloud Drive is on the local disk — in ~/Library/Containers. It is then synced to/from the cloud.

Your point remains, but for cloud sync, though.

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