I've managed to get through updating cycle during last few weekends. It all started with 27" iMac mid-2011 not capable updating to the latest LR. Don't ask why I just wanted to be able to update
But before that there were other things, as well.
What I did was a bit troublesome and time consuming, and needed to put in some hard earned cash, as well. Although my employer paid part of it. During the covid time my employer had provided some computer gear to be used for work at home. And I ended up in the situation having 27" iMac together with 27" external display for work laptop side by side at my desk in the corner of living room. And double keyboard and mice, of course. My wife laughed my "flight-control" desk first but when weeks and months went by, the smile froze and eventually I understood I needed to do something
I decided to utilize shared 27" display, keyboard and mouse to both working gear and my hobbies with Mac. New M1 Mac mini seemed perfect, but I didn't want to invest too much money for internal SSD, and it had not been enough anyway, so needed room for my pictures. I spend some time researching and thinking how to avoid extra clutter on top of my desk. Eventually decided to go towards NAS for shared capacity for all needs of home computing, whether mobile or computers at home. To finance that I needed (well not needed, but wanted to optimize money burning rate) scale down iCloud and OneDrive subscriptions. You know, it is easy to just pile up more money to cloud subscriptions without thinking how much you in the end of the day end up spending to support Apple's and Microsoft's market value.
There were some obstacles in the journey, whether those were related to my troublesome updating of Apple devices with iCloud service, I don't know. I've had some lagging issue already with my devices for some time. Anyways, it was painful process to download all my photos and videos and rest of the digital assets away from the cloud services, kill the backup process of my iMac to OneDrive and free up the disk-space there. Both Apple and Microsoft did their best to keep the grip on my digital assets. And Google Drive wasn't much easier. But eventually I managed to get all my digital assets away from these multiple services where I've been stuffing photos and videos for years.
I ended up to system where all my digital assets are now in the NAS by Synology. It serves my Lightroom as repository, central place for all archived digital stuff shared between the family members, available both mobile clients (iPhones and iPads of family members) and for Mac mini (by the way, new M1 Silicon Macs are quite awesome in term of performance) and older Intel MacBooks. The clients, whether mobile or computers, can now be a bit lighter builds. Backing up to AWS longterm storage bucket. All changes and scaling down the subscriptions will pay back my investments in 20'ish months. (Yes, I know, I had not thought a bit before, I was wasting money
)
Long story short, my computer's fine now, thanks for asking