I did same a long time ago.
I’m not sure what that means?
But yeah, I never allowed iCloud to sync Desktop & Documents.
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It’s clear Apple’s intent with their push about “your documents. everywhere” was (is) about selling cloud space. Their disk management implementation is weird and changes they’ve made in modern times have only made things even stranger.
And personally, I don’t know anyone using Files.app on mobile as their actual Finder. People launch apps and live in them on mobile. They don’t care much about the filesystem.
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I use a bibliographic reference manager called Bookends for my academic writing. It has macOS, iOS, and iPadOS versions. Bookends instructed me how to create its archive so that the PDFs that are stored with most of the references (about 1500 for me) are also accessible across devices, along with the references database itself. Bookends creates a folder in iCloud that stores the PDFs.
I also index this iCloud folder with DT. This allows me to do complex searches across all the PDFs, including content searches. It’s VERY useful. I have never had a problem with this.
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Thank you. I attempted to use Bookends many years ago and considered doing so again but its design has limitations so far as I am concerned.
Update. I have started from scratch. Now that I have a better understanding of what iCloud is intended, I have removed everything that I’d put in iCloud onto my computer. I shall use iCloud for Apple’s included apps, for example, Notes, not for anything else.
I also have a better understanding of what Dropbox is intended, so I have closed my account. Despite being a customer of Dropbox for several decades, and paying a year in advance, Dropbox is mean and will not refund a proportion of the payment. No matter. Something I discovered when I transferred my Law Library from Dropbox is that Dropbox had kept the content of each pdf, all I had was the file name. Until I remembered i’d saved all the pdfs onto an external disk before putting them on Dropbox, for a while I thought I’d lost more than 1,000 files including numerous cases that my subscription to a case law source doesn’t extend to. Also might’ve been lost was some legislation that has since been revoked.
Fortunately I have Time Machine on all the time and as I delete the duplicates am backing-up manually more often than hourly. Of course, that fills up the disk more quickly but once everything is completed to my satisfaction, I shall use a new disk for TM afresh. The Apple Care person showed me how to access Time Machine without going via the ‘concertina’, it is much easier and quicker to find anything.
Something this mess I caused through inexperience has given me is to check every single folder and file to delete duplicates (including triplicates and sometimes 4 versions of the same). I thought it would be safe to delete folders suffixed ‘copy’ until I discovered that applies only to the folder, not necessarily the files. Having started checking one by one, approximately 1,000, 000 files, I am using the opportunity to tidy the content of each folder for consistency and exclude from a parent folder a sub-folder that I want as a parent.
Having opened a new database in DT4 to index to pdfs, I am pleased to say normal service is resumed.
Thank you again for your comments and advice.
Mog, there are tools to find duplicates easily. I use BuhoCleaner, but there are other zillion applications that helps you to find those. You drop a folder to compare, and it finds the dups, some tools even finds “similar” files.
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which limitations did you have with bookends? you can also use bookends together with DTP.
I am doing that myself, Cmd+A to select all, drag into the folder to keep. Click skip, or keep both, or replace, as iI want. Delete processed folder. Add suffiix to keep folder to confirm having processed it.
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Bookends I conclude is best suited for automatic population of fields, per DOI. I’d have to do mine one at a time. Also I. have a private access website to which I can upload pdfs if i want. Generally, i find other people’s ideas on how to organise my workload not as efficient as mine. For example, when someone enquires about my professional services, it normally takes me a few seconds to check whether I have anything on my database about their property and.or in close proximity.