Yesterday, I lamented the limitations of BBEdit’s Dropbox sync:

I wish there was a way to sync language-specific settings for BBEdit via Dropbox.

Specifically, I wanted to sync my soft-wrap settings for Markdown files. My main need for this is in editing the text files that drive this blog¹. Yes, this is a trivial problem; it’s one checkbox in BBEdit’s Preferences Pane. It would be easy to recreate on both of my computers. It would be easier still if the preference would sync.

@daiwei replied on Micro.blog with an interesting idea:

If you know where the settings you want to synchronise are stored, simply copy that file(s) to where you want them on Dropbox, and symlink it/them?

I haven’t tried this, and I’m afraid of what might happen if I were to have BBEdit open on both computers at the same time. Maybe I’d just end up with conflicted copy files from Dropbox, but BBEdit’s release notes specifically call this out as unsupported:

The system does not support relocation of the core preferences data file (~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.bbedit.plist), so you won’t be able to synchronize preference settings.

The BBEdit support team replied to me on Twitter, and offered a solution I was completely unfamiliar with:

BBEdit has its own keys for Soft Wrap Text and other options that you can use: https://t.co/WEqVwg7XCf

— BBEdit (@bbedit) February 19, 2018

Apparently, BBEdit natively supports EditorConfig files. EditorConfig files are used to enforce consistent configurations across editors for a given project, and they’re fairly widely supported. While soft-wrap settings aren’t part of the core properties, BBEdit has defined BBEdit-specific keys, including x-soft-wrap-text, x-soft-wrap-mode, and x-soft-wrap-limit.

Based on this, I created an .editorconfig file in the root directory of the files for this blog, that only contains one key:

# EditorConfig is awesome: http://EditorConfig.org

# top-most EditorConfig file
root = true

# Soft-wrap every markdown file (in BBEdit only)
[*.md]
x-soft-wrap-text: 1

Now, if I ever forget to enable soft-wrap as a language-specific setting in BBEdit on a new machine, this file will override the global setting and enable soft-wrapping. I’ll still have to deal with this for files in other directories, but this will cover 90% of my use cases.

I published a Workflow.app Workflow a while back, and I was surprised to learn that, before the app is ‘accepted’ for publication, the Workflow team may edit your workflow.

The Workflow team confirmed this on Twitter:

We do make some edits for compatibility and best practices, but we're happy to change things back if you'd like!

— Workflow (@WorkflowHQ) March 21, 2017

This has been on my mind for a while, and my feelings are still conflicted:

• They didn’t tell me that they made changes, but the workflow is still attributed to me when you access it. This feels like a misrepresentation of my work.
• They actually improved the workflow slightly, and I’ve benefited from these improvements.

While I’m glad they improved it, I think they should have given me the right of refusal regarding accepting their changes, or at a minimum notified me that they were making changes. In this case, I would have accepted them, but I’m not sure that I always would.

Back in August, Crashplan announced they were leaving the consumer business. This is disappointing to me because I’ve had a family plan subscription for five years. Their service bailed me out when we had an apartment fire that destroyed our computers.

Michael Tsai has a great roundup of the community’s response, and the consensus opinion seems to be that BackBlaze is the best option for most people. For me, though, BackBlaze would be a substantial increase in price, since they don’t offer a family plan.

Over the five years I subscribed to Crashplan, I spent an average of $99/year¹ for unlimited storage space for up to ten computers. I only ever connected seven computers to the service, and they ranged in space requirements from 1.4 GB to 3.7 TB; in total, my cost worked out to $0.0016 per month per GB.

I’ve been considering my options:

• I can stay on Crashplan. On their small business plan, the cost becomes $10/month/computer, for a total of $840/year (although they’re offering 75% off for a year, so $210 for the next twelve months).
• I can switch to BackBlaze. To connect those seven computers would cost $420/year; this is still a substantial increase.
• I could try a more DIY solution, using Arq to backup to B2. Their price is $0.005/GB/month; this would cost me $304/year.

What I’ve settled on is a combination of the above. If I exclude the one computer with 3.7 TB of data, I can backup the other six computers to B2 for $82/year. For one year, I can continue backing up the large computer to Crashplan for $30/year ($2.50/month), for a total of $112/year². This is the lowest cost option I’ve seen, and keeps the price increase to a minimum.

After the first year, I’ll likely switch the large computer over to BackBlaze, since it will be half the cost (at $5/month) of staying on Crashplan Small Business (at $10/month). That will bring my annual costs to around $140/year.

This is a fairly substantial price hike, but the value of cloud backups is well worth this price increase. However, having been burned once, I’d avoid Crashplan at all costs if I were considering solutions for a small business.