The Cloud (Storage)
4 Jan 2023 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWe've been using Evernote to store our recipes for years. Each recipe has a file, and all of them can be accessed from the tablet or my phone, and I can add new ones from the desktop. In principle there are a variety of cloud storage things that you could use this way, aside from a completely DIY solution (which would require looking up how to do lots of things like make one of our computers into the server, etc. Like, we've used one of our computers that way in the past, but accessing it remotely from an Android tablet would require a bit more effort than from a Linux desktop).
I've gotta assume that Evernote is getting more and more urgently in need of money because it's been escalating its ads and pleas for monthly fees over the years, and now it's making multiple popups every single time you open the tablet, which is pissing me off to the point of being unwilling to use it anymore. The problem is deciding where to transfer the recipes, though. Google Docs, which we already use for other things, is an obvious alternative, but it also seems a little needlessly feature-rich when the recipes themselves are tiny plain text notes. A reminder or list app? I investigated these a little and ultimately it looks like none of them are significantly better than Google Keep, which I already use, for my purposes, but migrating to Google Keep would involve a fair amount of manual re-tagging labor.
But speaking of Google! I was at a board meeting recently for work and one of the board members asked if anybody knew what to do because Google is saying that her storage is almost used up. A couple of board members suggested a computer expert, the ones we hired to update the work computers actually, but another one said "In the end I don't think you have any alternative. It happened to me and now I just pay them every month, because there's nothing you can do. I mean it's all your pictures, and you don't want them to take them away." Amazing.
You don't HAVE to store all your stuff in the cloud! (But maybe if you're not very ~leet you really do? Because modern-day computer literacy, even for 'digital native' children, seems to consist largely in how to use apps and services as designed, and things like migrating, downloading, manual backups, etc are outsourced to ~IT professionals. People who learned computers before they did it all for you, and hence know about file architecture and formats and so on, are evidently becoming scarcer, even though that was like the absolute basics when I was in secondary school. ETA: both these women are older than me, but I suppose they are probably both simply old enough that they didn't learn to use personal computers in secondary school at all. My wife did, and they probably went to the same primary school system as her - this local one - but she was in what we'd call middle school when the earliest Windows computers appeared in schools. Five or ten years earlier and they could miss all that. I wonder what it was like for people who were in college when Windows 3.0/3.1 came out?)
In fact, years ago I started going through my old photos and downloading them, organized into month folders, and that gave me the opportunity to delete the ones I don't want that I hadn't deleted at the time. About a year ago Google gave me that message and it was a good motivation to finish backing them up and culling the bad ones, which has the side effect of making it easier to find old pictures - reducing the pool to a size that's more manageable and searchable.
It's not really that time consuming, and computer storage is no longer prohibitively expensive: we can store all my years of photos in two separate copies with multiple SSDs and external HDDs in the household. HOWEVER, even though I deleted most of the photos in my Google Photos account over a year ago, Google Photos still doesn't know about this. In the days right after I did it there were some weird errors when I tried to scroll back - like it got confused and froze up trying to adjust how far the scrollbar should go, and jumped around when I went back in time. Now a year later, though, it's telling me that my storage is full again, when it most definitely is not. So I'm gonna have to send a support ticket about it, I guess.
I've gotta assume that Evernote is getting more and more urgently in need of money because it's been escalating its ads and pleas for monthly fees over the years, and now it's making multiple popups every single time you open the tablet, which is pissing me off to the point of being unwilling to use it anymore. The problem is deciding where to transfer the recipes, though. Google Docs, which we already use for other things, is an obvious alternative, but it also seems a little needlessly feature-rich when the recipes themselves are tiny plain text notes. A reminder or list app? I investigated these a little and ultimately it looks like none of them are significantly better than Google Keep, which I already use, for my purposes, but migrating to Google Keep would involve a fair amount of manual re-tagging labor.
But speaking of Google! I was at a board meeting recently for work and one of the board members asked if anybody knew what to do because Google is saying that her storage is almost used up. A couple of board members suggested a computer expert, the ones we hired to update the work computers actually, but another one said "In the end I don't think you have any alternative. It happened to me and now I just pay them every month, because there's nothing you can do. I mean it's all your pictures, and you don't want them to take them away." Amazing.
You don't HAVE to store all your stuff in the cloud! (But maybe if you're not very ~leet you really do? Because modern-day computer literacy, even for 'digital native' children, seems to consist largely in how to use apps and services as designed, and things like migrating, downloading, manual backups, etc are outsourced to ~IT professionals. People who learned computers before they did it all for you, and hence know about file architecture and formats and so on, are evidently becoming scarcer, even though that was like the absolute basics when I was in secondary school. ETA: both these women are older than me, but I suppose they are probably both simply old enough that they didn't learn to use personal computers in secondary school at all. My wife did, and they probably went to the same primary school system as her - this local one - but she was in what we'd call middle school when the earliest Windows computers appeared in schools. Five or ten years earlier and they could miss all that. I wonder what it was like for people who were in college when Windows 3.0/3.1 came out?)
In fact, years ago I started going through my old photos and downloading them, organized into month folders, and that gave me the opportunity to delete the ones I don't want that I hadn't deleted at the time. About a year ago Google gave me that message and it was a good motivation to finish backing them up and culling the bad ones, which has the side effect of making it easier to find old pictures - reducing the pool to a size that's more manageable and searchable.
It's not really that time consuming, and computer storage is no longer prohibitively expensive: we can store all my years of photos in two separate copies with multiple SSDs and external HDDs in the household. HOWEVER, even though I deleted most of the photos in my Google Photos account over a year ago, Google Photos still doesn't know about this. In the days right after I did it there were some weird errors when I tried to scroll back - like it got confused and froze up trying to adjust how far the scrollbar should go, and jumped around when I went back in time. Now a year later, though, it's telling me that my storage is full again, when it most definitely is not. So I'm gonna have to send a support ticket about it, I guess.
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Date: 5 Jan 2023 06:14 pm (UTC)if you want to be future-proof, text or HTML files (as syderia suggested) in a clowd are the only solution
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 01:31 am (UTC)I've given in and am using Paprika for recipes. A unitasker, but it parses online recipes well and I like the way it handles metadata, so I caved and bought it.
But the cloud is the cloud is the cloud and Google Keep seems as good as anything else. Though I think laverna.cc is free, open source, and supports bringing your own cloud storage/syncing.
You're identifying something I've been feeling more and more: that I'm in the middle of a bell curve of technology, with older folks coming to early and younger folks coming to late for an architectural understanding of file systems (or hell, of the implications of digital privacy, zero sum game though it sometimes seem to be).
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 07:57 am (UTC)Those who are just a little older than us never quite got the hang of technology in the same way, which has been talked about a lot, but those who are younger have had their experiences cultivated, streamlined, and normalized--Google shows you what it wants you to see, and social media is king. Truly understanding how to utilize a computer, or the internet, feels like such a rarity, these days!
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 09:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 01:51 pm (UTC)I do also wonder if Dreamwidth's user base is self-selecting for higher tech skill and interest, a bit. I'll be the first to admit that my HTML knowledge peaked pre-5.0 in the geocities era, but I've still got a foundation of mental fluency that lets me work in tech outside of engineering.
But yes, agree about both the cultivated experience and the impact of using devices so early! My subjective feeling is that there's a difference between getting online for the first time on a desktop in one's tweens vs. having an iPad from age two. Not ready to form a cogent argument with bullet points, but it feels different.
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 09:10 am (UTC)Yes, and it's really annoying! I want someone to teach them all in school so I wouldn't have to explain file types or directories to every old and young person I converse with!
Uh, and also for their own good, obviously.
Ps. Thanks for the rec! I'm checking laverna out.
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 01:46 pm (UTC)Being tech support for everyone is definitely frustrating!
I'm a non-practicing info science/librarian person and spend a lot of time thinking about papers from grad school looking at people's mental models and behaviors around search, retrieval, and information storage.
I wonder about those mental models shifting and how the shift will impact software and design in the coming decades. Maybe the software engineer pipeline will be a religious order of sorts that keeps certain knowledge going, but I could also see a world where some base assumptions get eroded in the face of mobile devices becoming the default/majority. Who knows!
May we live in interesting times, or something. 🙃
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 05:51 am (UTC)For more generic Cloud Storage without ads, text files in Dropbox?
(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 08:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 5 Jan 2023 07:20 pm (UTC)