I think I am getting somewhere with cleaning up my phone home screen.
Obsidian everywhere synced through Icloud drive feels great so far. Out of curiosity, I brought up a note on my computer, then edited it on my phone. Updates were synced and visible on the computer screen almost word for word, I feel like they mostly appeared by the time I finished one and looked up.
And the Obisidian app itself seems to be just as full of smart features and things worth exploring as the Mac app. Seems like I can get all the (few, admittedly) plugins I want, and I discovered by happy accident that even the command palette is just one convenient swipe away. Now I feel a need to explore what more smart touch adjustments they may have hidden in there.
Sync status
My photo library finished its big initial sync yesterday, so now I am approaching some kind of typical use stage. The next little project is probably to move this site out of Dropbox, and once I have that done I think I can actually shut down that service completely if I like.
I probably will not, it is always good to have another sync service account around, but I do think I will move all my files out and remove Maestral from all my computers.
It does have a bit of a "the end of an era" feel to it. I have been using Dropbox since almost actually forever. I was surprised to look it up on Wikipedia and discover that Dropbox was first released as "late" as 2008, because I was just about to make up memories of setting up Dropbox on my Windows boxes before even getting my first Mac. Oh well, 15 years is more than enough to qualify for era status when it comes to software and services.
I do feel the need to move though, even if the catalyst turns out to be Maestral more than Dropbox itself. Another file in the site folder just reverted to 0 bytes, and that seems to have got synced up as well. Which makes the move a little bit scarier as well, as I guess I need to get to some kind of reliable state of all the files, so that I do not make a move and end up losing some files along the way.
Oh no. There are zero-byte files lying around here and there in the really old archives as well. Unless Dropbox has had problems of its own, or I have done something strange at some point (not at all impossible), I am starting to think that trusting Maestral was a mistake.
I guess … if nothing else, I could turn off Maestral on all computers, move the site to Icloud drive on one of them, and then compare on the other one(s) and see if anything is missing. Great, just the kind of thing your want file syncing to force you to think about …
All right: updated plan. Step one: Install the real Dropbox client and actually get things to look the same before moving on!
(Possible later step: Consider moving archive-age files out of actively synced space to give any and all services less of a chance to mess things up with files which I actually never want to write to or change anymore?)
Back in Dropbox
It asked for way too many permissions, it wanted me to try new things and push notifications in my face, but the official Dropbox client did let me sort out the login situation (i.e. throw every other old device out), and - crucially - got my files in sync without issue.
It looks like the recent zero byte files - those which were full texts on one computer but en empty file on the other - were cases where Maestral should have created conflict copy files.
The older files are strange though. I am hoping that - perhaps - they are results of Maestral incorrectly re-creating things which I had deleted (because I moved them to some archive) long ago, but it is hard to tell. And Dropbox' own version history is a frightening thing to look at, because every single file is logged as having been deleted and re-added by me hundreds of times in the last 30 days alone. I guess I could pay for more history and dig even further back, but honestly not even I care that much about my old notes. Although it would have been a little bit fun to see what I wrote about that conference in 2011 …