 Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Pond. This is episode number 764 for April 13th, 2023. And I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. Well, I've always said that I enjoy talking to Adam Angst of tidbits so much that I'd listen to him talk about advances in toenail clipper technology. So I'd like to welcome back to the show. I have opinions there. I have opinions. No. Of course you do. I don't believe that. It's like when Adam and I get together, it's instant improv. Whatever I say, he's already got the answer to it. And answer to. There's probably multiple ones. That's true. That's true. But I'm more reliable than ChatGPT. Well, that's set your bar a little bit higher. Just a little bit higher than that. Well, Adam wrote a really interesting article at the beginning of February in tidbits. And it would have been really, really good if I had read that article before I ran into some huge problems that I didn't realize were caused by what he's going to teach us about today. That's why I write it at specific times because I know you're going to, but you got to read the article. I'm telling you, they're timed properly. Exactly. It's like just read it. I did eventually circle back to realizing this was the root cause, but I didn't even know it was the root cause until I was most of the way done reading your article. So it's really unfortunate. So everybody should subscribe to tidbits. Sorry, not just subscribe, actually read what they write in tidbits because it's amazing stuff. Immediately, because it will solve the problem you're going to have next week. Just a guarantee. That's what I need to do. I got to put it on the schedule. All right, so maybe you want to set up what it is we're talking about here. Let me give one quick, I'll give a quick setup. Has anybody here noticed that all of a sudden all of their cloud services moved into the location section of the left sidebar of their finder window? That's what we're going to talk about today, which I thought was just, oh, cool. They're more convenient now. I had no idea what was going on under the hood until I read Adam's article. Yeah, that's probably the most overt thing. I mean, they might have been good and told you they were doing something, but let's face it, apps update and tell us they're doing something all the time. And so it's a blah, blah, blah, whatever. You're busy, you're trying to get something done. It's starting up this dialogue and yeah, fine, go away. Well, and we're trained. Do your updates. Always do the updates, right? Because that's how you stay secure. You better do your updates. So this one turned out to be interesting and who read it? Yeah, and depending on who you are and what you do, it could have happened like three or four times with different services. So we're talking cloud storage here. That's the real thing. So Dropbox, Fox, Google Drive, OneDrive, not iCloud Drive, interestingly. iCloud Drive is special like so many other things from Apple. It also affected keep it that I use from reinvented software. It's like an ever known replacement. And it moved. Yep. So basically these things have been around for a long time and these services and what their great innovation was way back when was they integrated with the Finder and let's focus on Dropbox because they were the first and kind of the most interesting to begin with. And so you got a Dropbox folder in your home folder and it was just a normal folder with normal files in it but anything you put in there automatically uploaded to the Dropbox cloud and then down to any other of your devices you had. Now there's other collaboration features in too but that's not relevant for this talk. So basically you suddenly got this Finder folder that was automatically synced with all your other devices which is pretty cool, right? I thought so. I still think so actually. We still think so. It was really neat. We all loved it. And then as that we got Google Drive and we got Box and we got Microsoft OneDrive and they all more or less worked in the same way. There were differences between them and they actually different ones changed over time. So some of them for instance used a product called MacFuse to turn themselves into like literally volumes. So it was more like, you know, so the data was all on your drive but it looked like a disk. So when you have a disk showing up in the Finder on the desktop, they were their own disks. So some of them did that for a while. It varied. The important thing is it was all that way and different for each one of them. So what was true of Dropbox was not necessarily true of Google Drive was not necessarily true of OneDrive. There was also another interesting fact which we'll get to in a minute which was you could say that you wanted your Dropbox folder, Google Drive folder, whatever to be stored on an external drive. Oh, okay. That's so if you didn't have enough internal storage you could have offline storage there. Okay. Precisely. Makes sense. So this is, so this is all good. However, Apple in its infinite loop wisdom decides that... I see what you did there. Yeah, yeah, very good, very good. Right on the spot too. I wasn't even planning that. The Apple decides that they want to kind of create a unified approach to online storage services within macOS. And so they come up with something called... And I'm not against that. No, no, no, it was actually not a bad thing. It was confusing how they all were different and some of them like Google Drive was sitting at the top level but I didn't want it there and I tried to move it and it would come back and put it in the sidebar but then it would disappear. It was weird. Absolutely, absolutely. So right, so to be clear Apple is not doing this from like ill intent. And so it makes the goal is to make everything consistent and so that they all work in the same way. Which Apple, I mean, this has really come when Apple's things, right? Consistency, when you want to do something it should work the same way every time. And whether it's Dropbox or Google Drive it shouldn't really be that different. This change was also part of getting rid of kernel extensions too, wasn't it? Yeah, precisely. So that's the other thing is that all of these to be able to really muck with a finder in this way and to do all the file transfers in the background and whatnot, you had to have a kernel extension. And Apple announces, I'm not sure, two years ago maybe. That leaves, yeah. That kernel extensions are going away. Really, we mean it sometime. Now, Apple is pretty good about not making that happen too soon. They understand that, you know, like it's a big deal for a developer to completely re-architect their software. Well, and also notify the users a lot. I mean, I got rid of my Drobo's a couple of years ago and I'm still getting the notice telling me that Drobo's software, because I can't find it. It's a kernel extension, but if it's on my Mac, I can't find it. Oh, we can talk more about clean installs sometime other time. If you'd read tidbits this week, you'd know. I would love to talk to you about clean installs because I have opinions. Always the best. So at any event, so Apple says, okay, we're gonna deprecate kernel extensions. And so, but we've come up with a better way for you all to deal with this. And frankly, it's probably easier for all of these companies too, because they're gonna say, hey, look, there's now this thing called the File Provider API. And you basically, you do your stuff, talk into your service, no problem. And then you just call the File Provider API and we do all the stuff on the Mac. And this makes it easier for the developers. They don't have to maintain all this weird Mac code. Safer and more reliable for users, no kernel extensions. And Apple has a consistent user experience. This is not a bad thing in any way, shape, or form. However, there's some consequences. And that's where this article came from, which is these consequences because they're sort of subtle. So they're a little hard for the cloud storage services to convey concisely. And what I kept running into, I mean, actually, it took me a long time to write this article because I was, at first it was just sort of like stream of consciousness. Oh, this happens in Dropbox. Oh, look, Google Drive's different. Oh, look, OneDrive still does this. And then you thought maybe you should try to draw a cohesive story. Yeah, right. And then I'm like, okay, I got it. I mean, I spent three days doing this, sort of like, okay, now I gotta dive back in and rearrange everything once again. So you know what your problem is? You seem to like to be concise and clear and factual in your writing. Damn it. So it's a lot easier if you just fling crap out there and just move along. There's definitely something about monkeys and Shakespeare and flinging, but I'm not gonna go there. So in any event, so I started trying to pin down these services and what they were doing and figure out where they were similar, where they were different, and that's where the article comes from. And indeed, I mean, as you called out at the top, one of the really key things that people have noticed first is that sidebar locations and finder windows change that you probably had them in some location before, but it was not locations, certainly. And that's now just a checkbox in the finder settings. And so if you actually go to finder settings or finder preferences and look in the sidebar pane, you'll see there's now a cloud storage checkbox and click that and they'll just show up there. So that's sort of the simple thing. But here's where, part of this is where this is like my personal experience. It's better now, but when they were first doing this, and it's obviously been sporadic over time, they weren't very good at making the move from where they had stuff before to where it has to be now. Brief moment, let's talk about where all data has to live now. There is one location, which is your user folders, library folder in a folder called cloud storage. So tilde slash library slash cloud storage. And that is the one location to rule them all. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Again, good, good, good. So they're all in one spot. We now know if you need to do backups restoring things like that, you know that that's a place you can look for things, et cetera, et cetera. But that's different, right? And so the upgrade process for a number of them wasn't very smooth. They tend to, because you had this folder, like you had your Dropbox folder, your Google Drive folder, whatever. And then they went and sort of installed all this new stuff. And maybe they moved everything, but they didn't necessarily get rid of the old folder reliably. Plus, and then if you had sidebar, alias is basically sidebar items, to things in that folder. So like I have the to bits financials folder in Google Drive, which I had a sidebar item for. And when my folder got disconnected, in other words, my Google Drive folder, they moved all its contents, but they didn't get rid of the old one. Suddenly my sidebar item was pointing at something that wasn't being synced because it wasn't actually pointing at the new location. Did you talk about the sidebar stuff in the article? Because I didn't see that. Yes. And I looked out for disconnected local folders. Well, I read about disconnected local folders, but I didn't realize that the sidebar was doing it. Oh, this has gotten real weird. Oh, yeah. I am gonna have to go through what you, what? Yep. So basically. So what you should see is till the library cloud storage and then for example, Dropbox. And if you look in Dropbox, that's all your stuff. Correct? Right, correct. But if you see stuff anywhere else. That's deep in the hierarchy. Right. And if you deep anything in like your home folder, well, we'll talk about that. Because now it's, what was true in some of the earlier days of this migration isn't necessarily true for people who have migrated less, more recently. Okay. So, so. Oh, and let's say again, I'm not sure people, maybe everybody else paid better attention than I did, but I didn't realize I'd migrated. I just pushed, sure, do the update. So I didn't know any migration had happened. And Dropbox hasn't completed it yet. Some people are getting like, hey, you should upgrade your Dropbox on one Mac, but not on another. Oh, that's, that's cool. So it's actually okay. Because the Dropbox services between them, but that's my point is it's confusing right now to what state you're in. Mostly with Dropbox, the others have all pushed the migration harder. So that they're not really, they're not as concerning, but if it happened relatively recently and you didn't notice, and you'd say you don't use Google Drive a ton, but you do use it for certain things, you might not have noticed that your folders are disconnected. Oh yeah. And so you could be working, you could be working this, and this is what happened to me. I was like, that was literally saving, you know, like I saved, you know, like payroll, payroll PDFs and stuff like that in the Tibbets financials folder. And then I came to my desktop, I was doing it on my laptop, came to my desktop, I'm like, where are they? Why aren't they here? And, and I realized- But I'm so used to that happening, like between Steve and me, we say, we do all like all our travel stuff is in Google Drive, and I'm really used to going, okay, well, let me go figure out why Google Drive stopped syncing today, but I still would have been able to diagnose it. So, yeah, so it wasn't until, and actually the same thing happened on Tanya's machine where she ended up with these two folders. And so, and then of course you've got to go back and think like, how much work have I put into this system that might not have been synced anywhere? Because then you can't just throw out the disconnected folder, right? It might contain data that's not anywhere else. So yeah, so that's sort of the big, kind of warning, warning, warning that you got to be careful of. So, but the reason why I said like, it's not quite as simple as just looking, like, oh, no one looks in library slash cloud storage slash Dropbox, whatever, is because all the services now, they wised up and they make a sim link in your home folder. So you do have a Dropbox folder and a Google Drive folder in your home folder. But if they're done right, they're sim links, not standalone folders, and you can tell that easily in terminal but not in the finder. It's not trivial to determine the finder, what's a sim link and what's not. Okay. So again, the article has a little bit of terminal command to look at, to explain what's what because it's useful to be able to figure that out. I'm gonna give you one little tip while you're here that I think you might enjoy in the ease of explaining how to open a folder in the finder. If you have the path bar showing. Oh yes. You can right click and open in terminal so you can go right there without a bunch of shenanigans. But you had extra shenanigans in there that you said were extra. You do the open in turn. Oh, see I always do the, well it's not quite the same thing though. Let's see if I, hang on, let me go to a deeper one. Oh, yes, I tend to do, I know what I'm doing here is more dragging. The tip that in my term, my tip is if you drag a folder from the finder into terminal. Yeah, yeah. You'll get the real path to it, which is important when working with these things in the library cloud storage folder because it turns out they actually can have slightly funny names. Yeah, like it had your, my drive had my email address as part of the name when I pulled it in. Google drive does that and I believe box does too, but drop box does not. So. Yeah, I wonder whether the right click open in terminal. Oh, but yeah, but right click open in terminal is just how I, I didn't actually, I mean I sort of like I was where you could right click and get on those folders but I actually had never done the right click in terminal. So that's a good one. It was a listener something and I don't know who it was. They knew, they knew. Yeah. Okay, so you have instructions in there on how to find out whether the folders that you see in your home folder are SimLinks or whether they're duplicate folders which I thought I didn't have and I do. Right, SimLinks or duplicates or aliases. An alias is not the same as a SimLink but that's why I say the finder is not really reliable because if you do get info on your like the drop box folder in your home folder if it's a SimLink, it'll say it's an alias in the finder. Yeah, I think that's a feature of Apple nowadays is to just sprinkle random names around the exact same thing. Like a workflow and a quick action. There's like 11 names for it. Yeah, precisely. So that's nice. Yeah, and they're all part of continuity just so we're clear. Now that's continuity camera? Wait, no. Continuity, it's all continuity. I don't know what continuity is but I know it when I see it. So in any event. So you've got instructions on how to figure that out. I've got instructions for you to do that. But so there's another corollary to this like the folder might get disconnected which is some apps and things that you've made aliases to and whatnot, if they're hard coded and the SimLink thing doesn't work or you don't have it or whatever, they might break those paths might no longer resolve. So for instance, BB Edit and Keyboard Maestro have options to store your application support files or macros and stuff like that in Dropbox. So at one point in all this mess, I had trouble because like BB Edit didn't know where any of its stuff was and Keyboard Maestro was like, where like all my macros were gone. I was like, or it doesn't know if they were gone again. It was that they weren't updating because it was pointing at some local version. So it's just sort of a reminder that it can be more than just like a sidebar item that gets confused by this. So those disconnected local folders can actually have can cause apps to misbehave as well. Right, right. Okay, okay. I'm glad you're not going through all of the specific instructions but it was pretty easy to follow to see. Now that I'm looking two of mine are SimLinks good, but my drive is not and that's bad. And it also explains a symptom that I saw that I thought I'd fixed and I couldn't figure out why I didn't fix it was the sidebar item, one of my sidebar item says, Mammoth 2023 parentheses one. Like why does it have parentheses one? Let me go fix that. It's back. So I didn't really fix it because I wouldn't fix it over in my drive but it's not really fixed here in whatever this sidebar thing is, which is and I've also been running out of disk space. Might have both. A perfect segue because so this was one of the big things. So when I started researching this, like it sounds like you and I use these services relatively similarly, like relatively small files, a fair number of them, but not millions. I mean, we're kind of normal users. There are people who are not normal users. Again, we were talking earlier, people who are not like me and which is fine, which is fine, not criticizing, but you know, like there are people who do video work who have terabytes in Dropbox. Now, I personally think this is kind of crazy because I frankly wouldn't trust Dropbox with terabyte size files and whatnot, but hey, you know, it works for them, it works for them. I'm not gonna criticize. And so there is an incredibly long thread. It's like, I don't know, 50 screens of comments about this problem, which is that you cannot have your Dropbox folder on an external drive anymore. It has to live in tilde slash library slash cloud storage, which is on your internal drive. Because of the API, Apple mandated that. So this is a big problem for all the Dropbox people. And I was like hundreds and hundreds of comments. And when people are saying like, I pay Dropbox thousands of dollars a month because they have multiple terabytes of data with a Dropbox business account. They've got bunches of users. You know, they've got 20 users who are all working on this stuff, et cetera, et cetera. They consider this, this is like mission critical core of their business. And so you can imagine how happy they are with the, oh, it has to all live on in your internal drive. I'm sure they blame Dropbox. They're very unhappy with Dropbox. I mean, it's not entirely Dropbox, it's fault, obviously, but yeah, Dropbox has not solved this for them. And to be fair, their Dropbox is customer in this particular case. So however, of the four, the big four, Microsoft solved it. Oh, really? So, yep, with OneDrive, and this is only OneDrive, Microsoft figured out how to separate, they called it their sync route, which has to be in library slash cloud storage from their cache and their cache, you can now push off to an external drive. And the cache is where all the data lives of offline files, files you've downloaded. We'll talk a minute about the offline versus online files in a minute too. But so Dropbox, to their credit at some point says, we get that this hurts, we are working on it and we are stopping upgrades for everyone who has their Dropbox folder pointed to an external volume. That's good, I have a question here. What happens to that cache thing? Yes, yes, yes in the back, Allison, yeah. No, I always sit in the front row, you know. That's true, so do I, that's why we're here. That's how we met in person, we're sitting side by side. Teacher. So what happens if you run an app like CleanMyMac and it has that thing that says, recover 22 gigabytes of space if you purchase these caches? Don't know, good question. That would be sad. So I would suspect that it would know that OneDrive's cache is different. Different cache. Is different, yeah. I mean, I suspect that CleanMyMac's cache is stuff that's like really well-known Apple slash Unix caches that are, because they just have nothing else in the kind of like, if you're gonna build a utility like that and the MacPaw people are not dumb, you only work on data that you know is safe to delete. Yeah, yeah. I mean, cache data is usually for just for performance reasons. So you would only touch that. So I think that's safe. Yeah, it's good to start with MacPaw, not stupid. Yeah, right, not stupid. Very nice people. Very nice people. Very nice people holding on like crazy in Ukraine. So, you know. I think that should be an every ad for them. Also, they're in Ukraine. Yeah, right. I mean, they're the people who sent an apology because they were gonna be a little late getting back to people because their country got invaded. Yeah, right. So sorry. So sorry. Customer service is a little delayed because of missiles. Yeah, oops. Yeah, yeah, no. Super nice people. Yeah, I hung out with them at a conference shortly before the pandemic. So I was like, they were kind of foremost in my mind when all this nonsense happened. Okay, so let's keep talking about external drive stuff. There's a couple other workarounds which give me the, well, there's one workaround for Dropbox, which I have not tried, but I think is a cool idea. There's an open source Dropbox client called Maestro. M-A-E-S-T-R-A-L, Maestro. I've heard about that. I have not used it yet. And part of the reason is, is because I need to install it like on an older, like it's best if it's used like when you don't want Dropbox installed for real. And Dropbox has the three device limit for free accounts. I need to like spin up another Mac and install Maestro on it so I can see how it works in that scenario. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But Maestro does not, it uses the public Dropbox API. So it's like pretty much guaranteed to survive, Dropbox isn't going to kill that API willy-nilly because they're not a lawn musk. But the one thing it doesn't do that Dropbox, it doesn't do what's called binary diffs. So with Dropbox, let's say you have a 50 megabyte file and you change one word, Dropbox is smart enough to just upload that one word. Okay. And then download that one word to everyone else. So it's very efficient in its transmission. The Dropbox API does not allow that, the public one. So Maestro says, oh, that 50 megabyte file has changed. I don't care if it's one word, I'm uploading 50 megabytes up and 50 megabytes down to everyone else. So if you edit a part of a 200 gigabyte video file, you're uploading and downloading 200 gigabytes again. That's a problem. So sort of just the people who need this. Yeah. Okay. It's not really gonna work for the big video folks. So this- By the way, this screen flow, the video editor I use for doing screen casting very specifically throws up a warning saying, do not save your files on Dropbox. Because it's unreliable, not because of this. Yeah. So the problem is is that apps do not like having their data moved around underneath them. And that can happen. So what if someone's opened the same files somewhere else? You know, that like bad stuff can happen. So there is actually a solution. And I did a second article about this because I didn't know about it when I wrote this first one. For the video people who really do have terabytes of video and you know, a 20 person work group who need constant access to all this. There's a service called Lucidlink. And it's not cheap, but it's not expensive in the category of people who are spending thousands of dollars a month on Dropbox. And I would say that it's like twice as expensive as Dropbox or something like for your normal user. But anyway, what Lucidlink does, which is mind-bogglingly clever, is they go back to the MacFuse idea. So they actually mount what looks like a drive on your desktop. But unlike all the old cloud storage services in the past, Lucidlink's backing store, where the data really is, is a cloud native file system. Okay. So it is Dropbox and Google Drive are not that? No, no, no. You're always working on local data. You are never working on. This is a cloud native file system. So you need a lot of bandwidth? You do need a fair amount of bandwidth, but they, and I immediately hit exactly the same thing. It's like, ah, you gotta have fiber or whatnot. Like, fiber would be good, no question. But they say basically, for a couple of reasons, one, they have very significant caching. So they do cache a lot of data low boy. And also they, a normal disk would read, a normal SSD or hard drive would read data in 4K chunks. That's what the block size is. And whereas they make 256 kilobyte chunks. So they're bringing in, you know, somewhat larger butts. But basically, apparently, I'm taking this on faith and, you know, customers saying it works, video apps are kind of happy to stream, to bring in data like this. Okay, okay. They're really not perturbed by it at all. Word doesn't like it so much. But you're never gonna have a file that you probably couldn't deal with like that. So, I mean, in some sense, every, like every, because remember, think about it, this is just a file system. So Word says, you double click a document. Finder says, open this in Word. And Word's like, waiting for this file. That file, think about it when it was on floppy. It was slower than it was when it was coming from SSD, right? Word still has to wait until it's gotten what it needs. So this is just, it could be a slight delay longer, but if you have a hundred megabits down, you know, that's, that's, you know, that would, that used to be Ethernet, right? Right, right, right. So in any event, so Lucidlink is very cool. And anyone who's doing significant video or, you know, has like terabytes of data should absolutely look at it. So that's as an alternative to Dropbox, not, it doesn't work, but okay, okay, okay. And they actually have like, you know, comparison between Dropbox and Lucidlink and Google Drive and Lucidlink. Okay. So, but as I said, they seem like, I mean, I'm fascinated by what they're doing because it's technically brilliant in terms of having the internet be your backing store. I mean, like instead of a hard drive or an SSD, so underneath this file system. So, okay. Let's stick into the part about the, what's stored locally and in the cloud. Cause that's where things get real dicey for normal people. That's so, okay. So again, this is not new, but it is Apple made it consistent. So there's a problem with these cloud storage services, which is you have a 256 gigabyte drive on your MacBook Air or something like that. And you've got a two terabyte Dropbox account. There's no way you can fit all this stuff on your Mac. And this has been true for years. Again, nothing new here. Well, that's part of those things are so useful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, Dropbox had the idea of selective sync, for instance, you could set folders. It's why I used it instead of iCloud. Yeah, precisely. Right. And they all had something along those lines. So you could either say, I need this stuff to be local at all times so that I can use it on the airplane so it's fast to open, et cetera, et cetera. And this other stuff, yeah, I can wait. I can wait for it to come in. It's not gonna be a problem. And so what Apple said is, okay, fine. We understand that this is important. And so Apple has the concept. The terminology differs a little bit because they all tweak it around, but you'll see offline used or pinned sometimes to indicate files that live on your drive. They have been downloaded. Right. Versus online only. And online only files, as the name suggests, are just like their icons, their placeholders. And when you double click them or open them in any other way, they have to download before they can be opened. But you're in control of what's in that versus not in that as opposed to iCloud where it's going, don't worry, you're pretty little head about it. I'm gonna move these files that you don't need. We got this, we got this. Even if you have a massive drive. Yeah, yeah. So, right, precisely. Well, at least in theory, I haven't done exhaustive testing on this, but yes, you can specify at a folder level whether something's online only or offline. And of course, anytime you open something, it automatically becomes offline. So the important thing about this is that online only files don't really exist, right? Think about it. Think of it on your drive, on your drive, they don't. Oh, okay, right, right. So think about it, think about them like an alias. Think of them as an alias to this, you know, cloud storage, right? Right, cloud storage. So you click, you know, filename.pdf and it's gonna download and open. But could you search the contents of filename.pdf before you download it? No, no, no, no, no, no contents. It's got nothing, Spotlight can't do a thing. There's nothing to search. Similarly, can you back up the contents of filename.pdf? No, no, no, no, because there's nothing to do. There's no contents there. You're backing up an alias, basically. At best, you're backing up an alias. And I say that at best because in fact, this is one of the places where the different services vary. So for instance, with Google Drive, I could have to verify this. With, let's see, with Google, all right, with Dropbox, you'll see folders that contain online only files, but there'll be nothing in them. With Google Drive, you won't even see those folders if there's nothing in them. And that when you go to restore from a backup app because again, it's like there's nothing there. There's no there there. I'm not gonna say it's not in Oakland, but so basically these things are really amorphous. And what that means is, or what I recommend to everybody is, let's say you've done this migration. I can't predict what's going to have happened, but I believe that what it will try to do is have everything be online only in most cases. Online only. Online only because that's the truth, right? Truth is in the cloud. And so the local version is just a copy. And so when you do the first of the migration, easiest thing for them to do is just say, truth's in the cloud, all this local stuff, whatever. That seems like a poor way to do it if you have specifically said, I would like this folder to be offline. Well, so again, this is at the migration level when you first done your migration. Okay, not knowing you've done your migration, by the way. So we don't know if you have or not. And I said, I don't know that this is the case, but when looking at mine, man, there's a lot of stuff offline, which I don't think it should ever have been offline. So what I'm recommending is, is that if you are interested in searching or backups on these files. Working on a plane. Well, working on a plane is different from what I'm going to get to in just a second, which is that for searching and backups, immediately go in and make everything offline. To control click, you know, select all the folders, control click, and there's some kind of a command in there. It varies a little bit by service and I've got some of the examples in the article, whatever. But it's pretty obvious. It's like download now or make offline or something like that. It can like Dropbox and Google Drive are quite different that way. But they've all got something along those lines. If you make everything offline, that has download every piece of data I have in, Dropbox and Google Drive, whatever. If you have enough disk space. If you have enough disk space, again, assuming that's possible. And if you don't, you can probably do it folder by folder to make sure you have enough and go back and forth. And then let it sit until it backs up and spotlight indexes it, right? Because once it's that's done, it should be in the index. And even if you then later go back and say I need this disk space back and you evict them by saying, remove download or make online only, whatever the command is. They'll be in your backups at that moment. They should be in spotlight for searching. Spotlight's a little offy on the searching. And so you basically will have all those capabilities back. Now, as you said with planes, yeah, you gotta make it offline before you leave. Right, right. There's no two ways about it. Can I tell you the weird way I found this? So I said, had I read your article, and by the way, I said at the beginning that it was in February, but that was when you had a title of an article, Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled with Possible Storms. That was actually February of last year. Oh gosh, it was. Well, I'm really not paying attention. This has been going on for a while, right? No, this one was the early March. So yeah, the article we're talking about was March 10th. I sort of thought it was all gonna be cleared up by now. So it's clearly not. Exactly. But you are a good weather forecaster. So the way I discovered this was really obscure. I run a WordPress site for podfeed.com and I run a plugin called UPDraft Plus. And UPDraft Plus takes a snapshot of my website and it uploads it to Dropbox. Well, I don't need a million of these. So I have Paul Kim's wonderful Hazel, look at that folder and delete everything that's older than a month. So I only need like the last month's worth. And so it cleans it up, cleans it up, cleans it up. And then one day I'm looking, I'm going, why is all, it's full. I mean, there's like 40 of these folders in there. And so I go in and I look at the errors that are coming from Hazel and it says, resource deadlock avoided. Excuse me. So luckily Paul is like an incredibly responsive, wonderful developer. And he said, I don't know what that is, but I've been getting a lot of reports about it from people who use OneDrive. I'm gonna need you to contact Dropbox. So I wrote to Dropbox and they kind of started in the middle of the story, but eventually took me back to, oh, we wrote a blog post about what was happening and here's why. And it's- Don't you read our blog? Well, I gave him a hard time about that going, yes, it's the first thing I read every morning is the Dropbox blog. But the bottom line was the files weren't local. So Hazel couldn't delete them because they didn't exist here. Right. But it was, I sent that information back to Paul and I'm gonna send him a link to this article that goes into more depth. Because I said, if you get any comments from people from Dropbox, just send them right to this blog post. Cause it says very clearly, you might not be able to do stuff with these files cause they don't actually exist. And they said, go to the top level Dropbox folder, right click and say, make offline. And that brought everything in. And, but here's an interesting question for you, which is if you're still doing this, new ones come in, do they come in as online only? If I create a new folder, you mean? Or a new file in a folder. Backups are happening automatically, aren't they? From UpDraftPlus? Oh, yes. Let's see, Dropbox apps. Cause I'm betting those are online only when they come in. As of two days ago, it's online. Offline. No, no, no. Sorry, it's offline. I have dark green check marks next to everything. Okay. So they said that would work. That once you declare the folder level. Oh, okay. Yes. So that's a good seeded at the folder level. Yeah. So basically that's my concern here is that it's not quite clear to me what will happen going forward. And again, that's Dropbox. Who knows what Box and Google Drive and OneDrive do for their default action for new stuff. So hopefully it all works. But we don't actually know that. Let's count on it. Yeah, let's count. It always works. So there's another thing which is, it's not actually related to the offline online thing, but I do want to mention, which is some of, okay, this was weird before too. So remember, some of these services sort of set themselves up as drives and others as folders. Oh, right. That could be a little weird for volumes and, yeah, right, volumes and folders. And so you could run into some weirdnesses in two places. One was moving files, right? Because if you move a file between volumes, it copies. If you move a file between folders, it moves. But that behavior is different now. But it always moves now. That makes sense. Because there's a lot of library slash cloud storage, right, makes total sense. But that's different enough that they warn you a bit, some of them warn you about it. And so there could be like some of these, some of the, some of the docs, they're not confusing. But if you don't know why you're being told this, you're like, okay, fine. It moves. But if you were used to, I could move it from my OneDrive over to this folder I share with Adam and it's gonna be a copy and then all of a sudden it's leaving and I don't think of that. That's a good warning, but you're right. It would be, why are you telling me this? Right, precisely. So that's important fact number one, that's related to this. Important fact number two is, let's say you move something from your Dropbox or Google Drive hierarchy over to your desktop. Perfectly reasonable move, right? But what happens to the file and Dropbox? Well, it's gone, isn't it? Precisely. So on your Mac, it moves from really library class slash cloud storage slash Dropbox onto your desktop, no problem. You've still got the file, but in the Dropbox view of the universe, that file has just been deleted and is now in the Dropbox. What do I forget what they call it? 30-day deleted something. Right, precisely, trash. They all have different slightly different names for it. And that is true of all of them in some form or fashion. Because again, once a file has been taken out of their control from their perspective, it's deleted. And they're not gonna just remove it. They put it in usually the 30-day protected thing. So that's good. But it's something you gotta be aware of because it makes sense, but you still have to think about it, right? Because the file is deleted from Dropbox's perspective, but it's still sitting on your desktop for you. Didn't you say one of them doesn't put it in a 30-day delete folder though? No, they all do. There's another where I was stumbling a little bit. There's another oddity here, it is. Okay. The things I do for you. The things I do for you. Okay, you have an online only file. And it's in Dropbox, and you select it and hit Command Delete in the Finder. What happens to it? So I would have guessed it would go into the Finder Trash. And you would be wrong. If it was from Google Drive, you would be right. Oh, great. Yeah, right, see, that's the problem. So basically, an offline file is a real file, right? That's no problem. And so offline files, yes, if you delete one Dropbox, it will get deleted on the Dropbox Cloud and it will go into their recently deleted folder and it will go into the Mac OS Trash. Oh, it'll go into both, okay, if it's offline. Because, right, it's offline because it exists as a real file on your hard drive and it exists in the cloud too. But if it's an online only file, and Google Drive does the same thing. And one thing I haven't mentioned, you can actually tell when anything is online only because it has one of those great little cloud icons next to it in the Finder. And so if it has one of the cloud icons next to it in the file name or in the Finder listing, it's offline only. And so in Google Drive, you move it into the trash and it shows up in the trash with its little cloud icon still. But Dropbox, for reasons I do not know and probably will never be known to humankind, it just disappears the placeholder. So that online only icon just goes away. It never ends up in the Mac OS Trash. Oh, oh, yeah, that's nice. I mean, again, it's not the end of the world. We're not talking, you know, we're not talking, you know, like, you know, panic in the streets or anything, but you might wanna know. And then to be absolutely fair, all of them warn you about this stuff. But again, it's those dialogues that like you don't quite understand what they're saying at that moment because you're working on something else, right? Like you're not thinking, I need to understand my cloud storage service right now. You're thinking, I need to get the PDF done so I can hand it in by two o'clock, you know. Right, right, right, right. So would the bottom line be pay attention? I think for a while you would get what your service is doing. Yeah, pay attention, but I would, perhaps not even that much, more just like file this away as something to niggle at you if something ever is weird. Okay, like if I had read this beforehand or had this conversation, I would have gone, hey, remember that thing Adam talked about? I wonder if that's involved here. Precisely, I like, I really don't expect people to remember this whole article. It's way too finicky and detailed and stuff like that. You shouldn't have to, no one should have to. But it's good to read through the finicky details, I think, to say, okay, something, there's this many weirdnesses, pay attention to weird. Right, precisely. And I believe strongly in the trigger neuron concept, which is I don't have to remember something, I just have to, like, ooh, there's something. Let me go check. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a neuron fired, but I don't know why it fired, but let me go deal with it. It's when the neurons don't fire that you're just like, wow, should I have known? No one told me. Now Adam told you. Yeah, precisely. So one last question. When we talked about sim links, can we delete those with impunity? Yes. So I've got sim links to a couple of them at my top level, Allison, and I don't want them there. Never wanted them there, and now I can get rid of them. Yes. But not the one that's a real folder. Right, and do it in the finder. Yeah. Okay. And I say that because you don't wanna accidentally do an RM and terminal that traverses it. Right, because it's one of those RM commands that like since the early days of Unix has been like, yeah, don't do this because you could erase your entire drive, you know, RM desktop. Not that anybody has ever done that. Bart tells a great story about having done that. And he tells it to new people to say, you're never gonna do anything as dumb as what I did. Precisely. So yeah, if you just drag those to the finder, and then again, also like if you keep using it, if it were something like say it were a real folder and you dragged it to the finder, the trash, and then you tried to use it, the finder would yell at you. Okay. Because you'd be trying to open something with the trash and it won't do that. Right, right, right. So that's nice. I mean, it's like one thing I, I mean, I know there's people out there who like drag something with the trash and immediately empty, but I really don't recommend that. You're like letting it simmer for a little while. Let it simmer. You mean, you like- I let it still delete it after a while. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like unless you're low on disk space, I'm just like, yeah, whatever, I'll get to you sometime. I just every once while go, whoa, eight gigabytes, I better, I could probably get rid of that now. All unnecessary. Well, this has been fantastic out of my, I definitely would like to plan some more talks. We're gonna, we're definitely gonna talk about clean installs. Oh man, I can't compete on this topic because you knew so much more, but I might be able to hold my own chat and clean installs. I'll send you my latest articles. I read your articles. Do you? Oh, look at you. Yeah, I signed it up for them on my, the RSS, I have an RSS to email service that sends me stuff. They look like something fun, very cool, very cool. So if people wanna follow you online other than going to tidbits.com, is there a, let's see, a Mastodon link? There is a Mastodon link, which let me think, let me think, at adam angst at mastodon.social. Cool. One of the standards. I haven't quite, yeah, I haven't quite figured out how to like relate a Mastodon handle efficiently yet. So, but I'm actually at, I'm actually adam angst basically everywhere. Okay. There is another adam angst, but I feel a little sorry for him because I was there first. I'm older than he is. Oh, well, poor guy. Okay, well, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on. I really, really enjoyed it. You're very welcome. I had a great time too. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chinchat Across the Pond Light. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something, or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the PodFeed podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeed.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're gonna find different ways to contribute. If you'd like to do a one-time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you wanna make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button. You're only charged when I publish an episode of the NoCillicast, which let's face it, it's every single week, so I don't charge Patreon for Chinchat Across the Pond Light or programming by stealth episodes. Another way to contribute is to record a listener contribution. It's a great way to help the NoCillicast ways learn from you and takes a little bit of the load off of me doing all the work. If you wanna contact me for any reason, you can email me at alison at podfeed.com and I really encourage you to follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social. Maybe you wanna talk to the other NoCillicast ways. You can do that in our Slack group at podfeed.com slash slack. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.