Honestly, I don't keep files on MacOS. I upload all files I care about to Google drive, and use that directly for all editing/viewing/lookups. For any developm

Honestly, I don't keep files on MacOS. I upload all files I care about to Google drive, and use that directly for all editing/viewing/lookups. For any development work, including my home dir, I create individual git repositories, and put all relevant files within that repository. You can then easily back it up on gitlab, and take advantage of all version control features. It's only a matter of time before your laptop gets lost, stolen or fails catastrophically. You'll inevitably find yourself wanting to access the same files from multiple devices as well. Neither of this will be a problem if you keep your data in the cloud, and use your computer purely as a compute engine and local cache.