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Comment by bouncing | Hacker News Reader

I switched from Google Drive to iCloud in 2021. I haven’t looked back, but also, my use is neither heavy nor demanding. I just keep my documents in iCloud and otherwise use git for my heavy lifting professionally.

iCloud is opaque. It tells you if some file is syncing, or if it’s only in the cloud, but that’s really about it. There’s almost no level of control. If you want a revision history, that’s what Time Machine is for. Collaborate editing, API that apps to integrate into with, previewing without downloading, etc? Those are all not really options with iCloud.

But so far, it hasn’t lost any of my data and it is probably the most approachable option with an end-to-end encryption option (which I enable). Searching works well and even finds text in images and documents.

If you just need the basics and you’re all-in on Apple products, iCloud is great.

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And if you're not all-in I've found that using syncthing to share a subset of the icloud drive with linux hosts works fine

Yeah this is my opinion too. I had a mix of Drive and Dropbox (still have docs on drive), but moved everything to iCloud because I was already paying for backups for my phone.

It's not perfect, it's very opaque, but for a backup of important documents it's good. Lots of my apps also sync with iCloud anyway so I wouldn't be avoiding it, and get some extra storage for them I think, not that I need it.

If I was collaborating in any way at all I'd just be all in on Google Workspace with drive. My last company used it and it was excellent. Disclaimer, I now work at Google where we also obviously use it for everything, and it's also great here, but while I have a bias, I do think it's the best option for collaboration.

> for a backup of important documents it's good

You likely know, but iCloud is not a full backup; it’s a synchronization mechanism. That helps in cases of device loss, but not in all scenarios where a backup helps.

If you have a backup, you can restore past versions of files that you accidentally modified or deleted. iCloud will happily copy such changes and deletions to the iCloud copy of your data and to other devices linked to that copy, likely before you even notice you want to go back to an older version.

To get ‘real’ backups, Apple has Time Machine.

Dropbox, depending on your plan, allows you to restore older versions of files for 30, 180, or 365 days (https://help.dropbox.com/delete-restore/recover-older-versio...)

MacOS has a ‘Versions’ feature that in theory is similar (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40710/mac), but isn’t supported by all applications.

Matches my current experience. For my personal file sharing between devices/partner, iCloud works fine and is seamless. Anything having to do with document sharing/collaboration, Google Workspace has worked fine.

My only strong opinion in this space is to avoid anything OneDrive/Sharepoint related if you want to collaborate.

Search works with end-to-end encryption enabled? Even for files not available locally?

Again, iCloud is super-opaque, so it's hard to know exactly what's going on.

As far as I can tell, when you add a file to an iCloud folder, it indexes it locally, uploads it, and the index sticks around even after the file is evicted from local storage.

So for example, right now I searched for an address I haven't used in 10+ years. On my computer, Spotlight immediately found a PDF file that wasn't stored locally. However, I added that file from my computer, so it's in the index (presumably). If I do the same search from my phone, nothing is found, though searching the filename itself still works.

It would be nice if the index data itself were transmitted between devices, but, you take what you can get and it's pretty impressive as it is.

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