Sometimes sneaker net is best ...

J has a pair of elderly aunties in England to whom she always sends a Christmas card.

As they're both nearly ninety it has to be snail mail.

Normally the cards would have gone off earlier this month but J has spent the last ten days laid low by a flu like illness - we did some RATs a couple of days apart and both came up negative  so we're guessing it's just some nasty that makes you feel rotten.

Anyway, she's recovering now and suddenly realised this morning that she'd never posted the cards. In fact she'd never got as far as writing them.

Well there's absolutely no point doing so now, as they wouldn't get there until some time in early January.

So the workaround was to create an account with a print on demand Christmas card company in England and get them to send the cards first class, and hope that strikes and snow  notwithstanding, they'd get there in time.

Now J keeps a day book with notes and addresses in it, and guess what, she'd misplaced the old one with her aunties' postal addresses.

Not a problem, it'll be in a file on OneDrive with the other documents transferred across when she changed from an iMac to a windows laptop.

Except it wasn't.

Fortunately her old iMac was still sitting on the studio floor - I'd been weighing up whether to install Linux on it so that I could use it to examine scanned historical documents on it.

Well procrastination has its uses - it was still as it was when unplugged. 

The batteries in its keyboard and mouse were flat, but I still had the wired keyboard from the old vintage 2008 iMac I'd been using as a document viewer, plus an old mouse from some other machine that had gone to e-waste centre, so daisychaining them together should work.

Well I connected everything together, powered it up, and it went 'bong' in the way that Macs do when they're happy.

It did seem to hang halfway through startup but just before I was going to powercycle the machine it came back to life.

Logged in, and there was the document, a Libre Office 6 ODT file.

At first we tried to be clever and open Libre Office and do a 'send document', but the mail system's OAuth login token had long since expired, and it didn't seem worth doing battle with the keychain tool, so we saved it as a word file to a USB stick, took the stick across to J's Windows 11 laptop and copied the file to OneDrive.

The current version of word opened it without problems, meaning we were home and dry.

The moral of course is, when switching machines, just copy everything, and this includes all documents stored on a cloud provider if you're changing, in this case from iCloud to OneDrive.  You can get rid of the junk later when you are really sure you don't need it.

Inevitably you'll have more storage than previously so you won't really have a problem keeping some seeming junk around for a bit ...