Music, Pictures, and Documents

Music life was simpler in 1985. All my music was on 43 cassette tapes that i kept in my car. Computer life was simpler too. All my documents were stored on floppy disks that I carried with me.

Now we have cloud based storage with many options. Some storage systems are easier for Mac users, others easier for Windows users, others are easier for use in a web browser or on a Chrome book. The number of options is staggering.

Over the past few months I've been exploring options for storing music, pictures, and documents in the cloud. It turns out my needs are not as simple as I hoped. There are several options for cloud storage but none of them are both simple and free. To minimize my exploration costs, I focused on the free options first. These are Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Apple's iCloud.

Cutting to the chase, I've landed on Apple's iTunes Match for music, iCloud for photos, MicroSoft's OneDrive for documents, and Google Photos for redundant photo storage.

Effectively I have five groups of data to manage.

1. Music
2. Photos
3. Personal documents
4. Work documents
5. iPhone backups

We have been a Mac for 10 years now. Windows dominated until the hard drive in our windows box died. Then we bought a Mac Mini and reused the existing screen, keyboard, and mouse. For fun, I purchased a Windows laptop last January but found it was too much overhead to relearn things I was comfortable with on Mac and I sent it back to the store. Now we have many Apple devices - phones, tablets, laptops, and a desktop. The Mac mini has been mothballed - let me know if you want it.

With the Mac as our primary computer, exploring Apple options seemed like a good place to start. Until last year, Apple's storage options were too pricy so we chose a local hard disk backup instead of cloud based backup. Now we can get 200GB of storage from Apple for about $36/year - all my photos fit there so we are good.

The music problem has been solved with iTunes match for quite a while. The new Apple Music option may get me to review this decision but I'm in no hurry - iTunes match works fine and it allows me to hear our music from all our devices. It also allows us to keep two local physical copies of every song in case of disk failure.

The photo storage problem was initially solved by a big internal hard disk and a big external hard disk for backups. This has been good. The downside is that we generally needed to manually backup phone data and pictures to the desktop computer. The backups became cumbersome. 

Enter iCloud Photo Library. 

With iCloud Photo Library. enabled, all our devices backup new photos to the cloud. We configured the desktop computer to download full resolution copies of all photos and the laptops only keep low resolution versions. Now with iCloud backup, we can see all our photos from any web browser on any device.

With the advent of low priced iCloud storage, iCloud Photo Library is a clear win. The price is low, the integration is tight, the mental overhead is minimal.

Google photos is a good system for backup from the phone. It is not fully compatible with iPhoto cloud library though and it causes the phone to run out of storage. My solution is to use the Google photos app for viewing photos and the Google Photos Mac application to upload the whole library to the cloud. I chose free unlimited storage which provides lower resolution pictures. One nice thing about Google Photos is the Assistant. Google periodically trolls through my photo library and creates collages or movies or stories then alerts me they are ready for viewing. Each alert is a quick walk down memory lane and quite fun.

But what about those documents? I've tried several options here.

1. DropBox
2. Google drive
3. iCloud drive
4. OneDrive

Though DropBox was our initial leader, it never got a strong presence. Google drive was good but initially I needed to manually copy files through the web browser - this was too cumbersome. iCloud drive felt like an island for a long time so it never got a fair shot. I settled on OneDrive for Office integration and the perception of integration with Sharepoint. I say perception because the integration is loose at best.

OneDrive for business has a similar interaction model to OneDrive - though the current Mac client is broken. The interaction model is to specify a folder on you local disk that OneDrive synchronizes to the cloud. This makes it very easy to do work off-line and synchronize later. Now I have a consistent model for working with personal and work documents. 

As an added bonus, our iPhones automatically back up to iCloud drive. This means that whenever  we update iOS or get a new phone, our settings and apps pickup right where we left off. Nice.

So music life was simpler in 1985. Documents and pictures were simpler too. But instead of loitering in 30 year old technology, I'm riding the wave and trying new things. Sometimes I wish technology would stop changing so quickly, it takes a lot of energy to keep up.