Maybe the cloud isn’t all that. A few years ago I got a Synology NAS and it works pretty well. All of my photos from my phone are backed up effortlessly and I can access them from mobile using Synology apps. I can easily backup my camera photos, too, if I took the time to set it up. Right now I pay for the family plan for Microsoft 365, so Jeff and I can each get 1TB of OneDrive storage and access to the Microsoft Office apps.
But Word still drives me crazy, its permissions often create problems where none should exist, and there are free alternatives, like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. My next renewal is in April, I’m thinking I might go with the NAS and open source apps instead. I just need to be prepared to provide tech support for the inevitable friction from making the move!
Basically, I am feeling this urge to pare back everything to The Olden Days of Computing, where everything was mostly local and the internet was for cats. I’m not saying I want to go back to floppy disks, but some things were better way back when.
One of the reasons I chose to try Obsidian as my new note-taking app is that it works with plain text files and stores them locally, meaning there is less likelihood of file corruption due to weird syncing/internet issues. As they put in on their site:
In our age when cloud services can shutdown, getbought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary format and data lock-in.
With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life’s work held hostage in the cloud again.
Your notes live on your device, period. You can encrypt them or back them up however you want; it’s your decision, not ours. Plain text files let you do various sync, encryption, and data processing on top of it. Obsidian plays nice with Dropbox, Cryptomator, and any software that works with plain text files.
Here they suggest you can back up or sync files–if you choose–using whatever suitable service you may have access to.
I chose to use iCloud Drive, because it lets me sync between the three devices I’m likeliest to use Obsidian on:
Windows 11 PC
MacBook Air
iPad Pro
It has worked fine so far. But then it didn’t. Ack. What happened was I restarted my PC (because Windows 11 still requires reboots after most updates for reasons) and when I reloaded Obsidian, it began to sync files and folders, and to also index them, which it promised was a one-time operation. It then seemed to cough up a hairball on one file I had open previously (my random newsletter) and started creating non-working duplicates of it. It renamed the original file. It was just generally weird.
On the iPad and MacBook, things seemed to be working normally, so it appeared to be a Windows-specific issue. I managed to create a local version of the files and folders on my C: drive and that is working as expected, but on PC the iCloud version is still behaving weirdly. I might try duplicating the local version and see if that works.
My main point here is that the makers of Obsidian are right–while data failures are possible on local storage (SSD could suddenly die, for example), when your stuff lives in the cloud, you increase the surface area for failure/corruption and can potentially lose your data forever if you don’t have any local backup.
This has been a good reminder for me, albeit a somewhat unwelcome one.
I’m still deciding how best to maintain my Obsidian vault. Local network storage might be a way to go. We’ll see.
