Yesterday afternoon, I pulled the trigger: I switched to a big Icloud storage plan and began the process of moving things there.
Photos
The photo library upload is of course by far the heaviest and most long-running process going on. Working for perhaps 18 hours so far, it has about 44500 objects left to synchronize from the Mac mini, up to the cloud, and make available to all devices.
It is fun to se various image encoding, decoding, and upload services take turns at the top of the machine's process list. They are a bit timid about occupying the CPU:s, but taken as a whole this must still be by far the largest job I have ever handed this machine. I am sure it enjoys the exercise.
Even more fun is the act of finally - for the first time ever for me - having access to all of my photos ever right on my phone. I have already rediscovered images I like from years past which I would otherwise only have seen sitting in front of the right Mac in a dedicated photo browsing session. I would not be surprised if my usage of my own photo library goes up quite a bit thanks to this.
Notes
I actually started the whole process by carefully trying moving notes and Obsidian's vault to Icloud before I did anything else. The process was as straightforward as I had hoped: Create a new vault - which is a simple folder inside of Obsidian's folder on Icloud drive, copy notes there, done.
Oh, and wait for the Obsidian IOS app to index and settle down after the shock of launching and finding the vault now has 4000 notes instead of the single one it had last time.
I really need to send some money the Obsidian people's way, the app is so much better than it has any reason to be. Especially for free.
Website
Have not touched it yet, but my plan A is to do what I thought yesterday: keep the source files synced, but alter my shortcuts and process so that the output folder is kept local to each machine. The only question mark is whether there are any path gotchas or the like with running scripts against files on Icloud drive. Worst case, I can always fall back to a classic git repo or something. Any setup will be more reliable than the current one (just noticed Maestral had crashed again, and that this machine therefore currently lacks yesterday's post).
Other
There are probably a million little details to adjust over time as well, and of course on several different computers for additional fun. A major one is my system-wide shortcut to open today's note file. It just needs to point to the right place on Icloud drive, but I need to figure that out, and update it on all computers. Same thing for a bunch of sidebar shortcuts to various folders.
I am more delighted than perhaps I should be about soon being able to run one permanent background process less on all my machines, and about relying on one free service owned by corporate overlords of doubtful alignment with my priorities less.
Also
I still have a cold. So far today, it feels like yesterday was the peak. Fingers crossed. As I have noted before, one upside with being ill is that it makes me a bit better at doing nothing without feeling I should be doing other things. I have even watched a bunch of documentaries!
(I ended up switching to the computer which already had yesterday's post and finishing this post there, rather than wait for Maestral to figure everything out again.)