Burning through my Mac battery with iCloud drive

My mac has been burning through its battery in a couple of hours lately, which is odd since the whole selling point of the M1 Air is basically all day battery. I finally figured out that the culprit was iCloud drive.

TLDR: don’t use iCloud for files that you change a lot, such as complex notes in Obsidian, local builds of Jekyll or git repositories.

The longer version: not really thinking about it, I had my jekyll projects in my documents folder, which is synced with iCloud drive. Even a small change when running a local build changes hundreds of files, and iCloud can neither keep up, nor does it stop trying. I noticed the same if I switched branches on a git repo (I use local git for versioning, so kept it iCloud as a backup).

I also have a ton of files in both iA Writer and Obsidian. iCloud struggled there and created a lot of duplicates and had version conflicts.

And so I’ve started using dropbox for my local git repos, Jekyll projects, and large folders of notes. Dropbox gives you a lot more granular control: I don’t sync the .jekylcache or folders where the local builds are output. Now it’s not trying to catch up to a thousand files changed at once, and overall dropbox does better at handling when Obsidian changes a few dozen files at once.

This shows an unspoken philosophical bit about Apple. By wanting everything to “just work”, Apple doesn’t expose many fine grained settings on their flagship products, like iCloud. So you can’t exclude individual folders from syncing. And iCloud does work great for photos, files that mostly hang around in the background, and as a backend for applications like GoodLinks and Reeder. In other words, it’s fine for an iPhone, not great for doing productiony stuff on a Mac.

The more I think about it, the more generous I’m being by saying that iCloud mostly works. My phone aggressively moves files off the device to the cloud, which is annoying because I specifically bought a phone with more storage to avoid that. It’s the problem of building things when everyone in the room has a California worldview (cue Peter Thiel about diversity). Not everyone is always connected to high-speed internet, nor do all of those with the privilege wish to do so.

Another annoying thing is that the 2GB free tier of dropbox is more than enough for what I need. Yet I really detest the idea of not paying for a big tech services as I find the freemium model otherwise ethically dubious. That’s the same reason I don’t back up my local git repos on GitHub.