Backup solutions for an iOS-only household?

Monday, December 22, 2025

Just over a month ago, I was booting up our last remaining Mac for some routine maintenance. After watching Dock icons bounce for literally minutes, I had to ask why we even have an iMac from 2019. Turned out the answer was: because I’ve owned a Mac since 1997. That didn’t seem like a good enough answer.

My wife and I both have iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, plus we’re required to use Windows laptops for work. This is why I almost never used the iMac and, consequently, why whenever I found a use for it, I had to endure far too many minutes of waiting for it to boot up and launch an app. So, I decided to recycle the iMac and we’re now an iOS-only house (ignoring my son’s rarely used gaming PC).

The simplicity is nice and it helps keep me away from screens, since having a Mac was a good excuse to fiddle with software. This was partly made possible by my intentional adoption of mostly Apple default apps. Until the recent Apple ID debacle with Paris Buttfield-Addison, everything seemed good. Now that this glaring dependency is obvious, I do have some concerns. Specifically, all of our photos and files are only on iOS devices and only backed up via Apple’s backup service. This is no longer wise or sufficient. When we had a Mac, I’d happily used Backblaze for many years and now need the equivalent for iOS.

I asked for some advice on the friendly Hemispheric Views Discord and got pointers to some alternative webservices, along with this cool project. At the moment, I’m tempted by the Synology BeeStation, which seems to be a “local cloud” storage device. Having a physical drive in my home is appealing as a supplement to our online backups.

I’ll keep investigating. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Building a Commonplace Book System that actually works for me

Monday, December 15, 2025

I spend a lot of time reading, across many devices and sources. Much of it is meant to be informative and useful, not just entertainment. The problem is that without some system to capture and process what I’m reading, I don’t think that I’m capturing any meaningful insights.

A commonplace book is a time-tested method for collecting quotes, ideas, and reflections and has appealed to me for a while. I started experimenting with Quick Notes in Apple Notes, journal entries in DayOne, and analog capture in my Field Notes notebook. Each approach had merits, but I quickly realized I was creating three parallel systems driven by technical convenience rather than clear purpose.

The Real Problem: Retrieval, Not Capture

The challenge with commonplace books isn’t capture, it’s retrieval and action. I can fill notebooks with quotes, but if I can’t find them when I need them, what’s the point?

I already have a Safari shortcut that works well: it copies highlighted text from a webpage, prompts for my thoughts, then creates a DayOne entry with the quote, my reflection, and a proper citation. This was the standard I needed to match everywhere else.

The fragmentation problem became clear. When I wanted to reference something I’d read, where would I look? Quick Notes? DayOne? Field Notes? A system that makes me search three places isn’t much of a system.

Establishing Principles

Rather than continuing to accumulate tools, I needed principles:

One source of truth. All reading insights should go to one place, regardless of where I’m reading. The capture method is secondary to having a single, searchable archive.

Quality over convenience. Friction in capture isn’t a bug. If something isn’t worth 30 seconds to capture properly, it’s probably not worth keeping.

Structure should emerge from use. Don’t design an elaborate tagging taxonomy upfront. Start minimal and add structure only when you have a specific retrieval problem to solve.

Don’t redesign around new hardware. I was partly being influenced by having just switched to an iPad mini with an Apple Pencil. The Quick Notes feature felt compelling, but the novelty of new hardware shouldn’t dictate my information architecture.

The Decision

DayOne became the clear choice. It already contained my existing captures with full context and time-stamping. The Safari workflow proved the format worked: quote + thought + citation.

For captures from other sources, I accept manual entry. Yes, it’s more friction than a quick note or photo, but that’s the quality control mechanism. Not every highlighted passage deserves permanent archiving.

Field Notes remains in my daily workflow, but its role is different now. It’s for processing thoughts, not storing them permanently. When I capture analog notes, I flag them for weekly transfer to DayOne, if they’re still worth keeping after some time has passed.

Note to My Future Self

When I’m inevitably tempted to add another capture system, I’ll return to this: the problem is never the tool. The problem is fragmenting my attention and information across multiple incompatible systems.

The goal isn’t the perfect commonplace book. It’s having a system reliable enough that I actually use it, simple enough that it doesn’t become a project itself, and effective enough that I can find what I’m looking for.