[HN Gopher] iCloud Drive silently deletes your content
___________________________________________________________________
iCloud Drive silently deletes your content
Author : dominikmayer
Score : 277 points
Date : 2023-09-23 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dominikmayer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dominikmayer.com)
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| iCloud lost some of my files as well and I never found out what
| caused it. I store my tax related documents in a folder per tax
| year. I only ever change this year's tax folder. The folders for
| previous tax years are frozen for obvious reasons. And yet when I
| ran find to look for empty folders some of those old tax folders
| were empty.
|
| I had backups, so the files are not actually gone, but my trust
| in iCloud Drive is.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You have added to my to do list. Do I need to worry about this
| if I have Time Machine backups?
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Hi, original author here. Not sure about the issue when whole
| files are gone but regarding content being deleted inside the
| files Time Machine doesn't help. The problem is that you
| won't know which files have been changed. And Time Machine
| will gradually phase out old backups, only keeping one per
| week, month, year or whatever the policy is. So at some point
| the files with your content will be gone and only backups of
| the files without your content will be stored.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Probably not. Time Machine should protect you against the
| problem I had unless you purge old backups. I don't think
| Time Machine ever deletes the one and only version it has of
| a file.
|
| But dominikmayer has a very good point there in the sibling
| comment. I think this would only affect files that change
| though.
| [deleted]
| ezfe wrote:
| No, if you have Time Machine backups your fine (also if you
| don't have optimize storage - Time Machine may not back up
| files that aren't locally stored, regardless of sync
| provider)
| paulpauper wrote:
| Always make offline backups, including for dropbox too. Storing
| things in the cloud is never as safe as assumed.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Dropbox is mentioned in the article and it does _not_ behave
| the way described here for iCloud. I can confirm Dropbox does
| indeed behave differently, as described in the article.
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Hi, original author here. The problem is not the lack of a
| backup. The problem is that the content deletion happens
| silently. So you won't know that you need to restore from your
| backup because you don't expect the content of your file to
| disappear. And over time your correct backups are deleted and
| the only ones left are those with the missing content.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Is it even possible to locally backup everything to the same
| fidelity as the Cloud? Apple (for your protection, naturally)
| seemingly locks you out of much of your own data.
| tamimio wrote:
| Just use obsidian with git addon, sync all your notes with
| versioning too that you can access your in your remote git repo
| (or github).
| Etheryte wrote:
| While Obsidian is neat, that doesn't address the same set of
| requirements as iCloud Drive. Drive works comfortably with all
| types of files, not just notes, without embedding files in
| notes or whatnot.
| ralphc wrote:
| Am I the only person left on the planet that doesn't trust or use
| iCloud, regularly backing up photos onto my computer then
| plugging in a hard drive for Time Machine?
| endominus wrote:
| I find it difficult to trust Apple as a steward of its customers'
| data.
|
| Speaking second-hand here; my brother is an Apple devotee and a
| music buff. For many years, he collected recordings of live music
| shows. They were rare if not entirely transient (in that it would
| be impossible to reacquire them if lost), and he had a good
| library of them. Stored on his iMac. Then (as he tells the story)
| one day iTunes decided to replace all of his rare recordings with
| the equivalent studio songs. They were gone, and the support
| personnel he contacted told him they could never be recovered.
|
| He still uses Apple computers, but I don't think that wound will
| ever fully heal.
| gatinsama wrote:
| "He still uses Apple computers". That's the problem right
| there.
|
| Apple users have an abusive relationship with the brand. They
| forgive everything.
| aj7 wrote:
| Not everything.
|
| But not going back to Windows.
| chungy wrote:
| Install Ubuntu then.
| eastbound wrote:
| Ubuntu can't get the mouse speed right.
|
| I've bought the best laptops money could get for some
| employees, System76. The fans are like whistles in the
| office: Impossible to work with them.
|
| There's nothing that works right with PCs.
| aj7 wrote:
| That's absolutely horrific. They should be sued, but it would
| take infinitely deep pockets to win.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| I had an uncle who had a hobby of rewriting entire novels, but
| often inserting his own tweaks to the story or characters. One
| day, all his work was replaced by the original novels, sans his
| edits. He was mortified and very bothered by it, but when I
| asked why he didnt just switch to Linux, he said that he 'hates
| computers'.
| antonkar wrote:
| Apple Books on his Mac did it?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| That's horrifying. Imagine he was an elderly lawyer and those
| were signed legal contracts, you could literally lose your
| life's savings, etc.
| threeseed wrote:
| > all his work was replaced by the original novels, sans his
| edits
|
| Or he could just not have pressed Save.
|
| Like so many, many people have done through the lifetime of
| computing.
| chungy wrote:
| I take it he never made backups?
| [deleted]
| sroussey wrote:
| That was a feature you had to pay for in iTunes back in the
| day.
| threeseed wrote:
| This is referring to iTunes Match. An opt-in feature where you
| would upload your own MP3s to Apple for them to host and where
| there is an _option_ to replace those songs with high-quality
| versions from the record labels.
|
| a) Your brother should have taken backups of his MP3s as he was
| advised.
|
| b) He pressed the button to replace the songs because there is
| no evidence, anywhere of this happening automatically. And
| common sense suggests this is the case because there would be a
| lot more uproar if 10's of millions of users songs were
| suddenly disappearing at once.
| neilv wrote:
| A hint at the underlying problem is calling it "content" instead
| of data.
|
| If you're an aspiring "influencer", producing "content", then go
| ahead and use bobblehead platforms designed deeply and
| pervasively to think of the user as a consumer of content, or a
| captive property of the developer.
|
| If you're a hacker or a software engineer, you probably want to
| be investing in platforms intended for people like yourself.
| Which, right now, pretty much means Linux or a BSD.
| andybak wrote:
| I think I'd at least partially agree with your point if I could
| get past the extremely off-putting way you've chosen to express
| it.
| neilv wrote:
| Agreed, I should've written it better.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Eh? Propagandists take care to present their arguments
| palatably. It's a very poor way to judge truth.
| andybak wrote:
| That's not quite what I meant.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| The author suggests using git. But be warned git doesn't work
| well with iCloud Drive. I used to have hundreds of git
| repositories in my iCloud Drive. Periodically, doing a big commit
| would trigger my whole multi-hundred gigabyte iCloud Drive to
| resync with Apple's servers. This would take a day to complete. I
| went through Apple support up to quite a high level to try to
| resolve it and they never did. Now I keep my git repositories
| outside of iCloud Drive. The trigger seems to be if you ever
| change hundreds of files at the same time in quick succession
| before the last set of big changes finished syncing.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I'm truly curious why would you use iCloud to back up git. Why
| not just push your git to the remote?
| Tempat wrote:
| You can make a local git repo without having a remote server.
| Then they're backing it up off site with iCloud.
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Hi, original author here. In my case it's not that I want to
| use git. I just need a way to see which files got changed. At
| least until I can move the last ones out. I still rely on one
| app that only syncs via iCloud Drive.
| brycewray wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35853139/can-git-and-icl...
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Hi, original author here. Thanks for sharing.
|
| My problem is, that I need to use iCloud Drive for some
| important files because the app I need to use doesn't support
| another way to sync.
|
| Without git I wouldn't have figured out which files have
| changed. (And even with git, I can't be sure that I caught
| everything. I guess git content can also be altered by iCloud
| sync conflicts...)
| eviks wrote:
| you might store the git repo on a Dropbox folder (not a good
| idea in general, afaik clouds aren't reliable enough for git,
| but as a backup), this way git content can't be corrupted by
| iCloud?
|
| Or maybe even locally if you don't need to commit on other
| computers, then you'll be certain that git is correct without
| any cloud intervention
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Can I store the hidden git folder outside of the repo
| content? Not sure how to say.
|
| My problem is, that for the time being, some of my files
| needs to be on iCloud Drive because I rely on one app to
| edit/create them. Everything else I moved out of iCloud
| Drive.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Yes the (in git terminology) repository (.git folder) can
| be completely separate from the working directory (folder
| on your iCloud drive)
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Thank you! I didn't know. I'll research and move the
| folder.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| For what it's worth, git also can fail in some pretty bizarre
| ways in Dropbox for much the same reasons. I've used git-
| remote-dropbox [1] in the past to use Dropbox as a git server.
|
| [1] https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox
| amelius wrote:
| Git doesn't even work well with large binary objects.
| toenail wrote:
| Yes, and git doesn't play video files either, because it is a
| version control tool for source code, not random binary data.
| amelius wrote:
| It's a different topic but often there's binary data that
| evolves along with source code, so it makes sense to put it
| in the same repo. Also, other version control systems make
| no assumptions about the underlying data, except when
| diffing and merging. People want and need this, and it
| seems reasonable.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| I thought it was common knowledge that you shouldn't mix git
| (and similar VCS) with cloud drives and their cloud based
| version control (iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive etc.). The two
| don't mix well and there's room for all sorts of weird and
| unexpected behaviours especially if you have multiple devices
| synced to the same cloud drive.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, you definitely shouldn't. I don't know if it's common
| knowledge so much as some git operation will start failing
| after the fifth commit, so you figure it out pretty quick.
|
| I do have to say, I've never understood _why_ git doesn 't
| work well with cloud drives. File management seems like a
| straightforward enough set of operations that ought to be
| bulletproof. I've never understood what precise operation
| gets corrupted when using git, and how that's possible at
| all.
|
| And I don't know if the fault is the cloud or git. Is it that
| the cloud returns errors 0.5% of the time, and git silently
| ignores those instead of retrying, and corrupts data? Or is
| it something about git reading and writing so many files so
| quickly that operations on the cloud drive somehow get lost
| or out of order but without generating errors? Both seem
| equally implausible, and yet...
| dpc_01234 wrote:
| I'm using syncthing to keep bare repos of my git dotfiles and
| alikes. Never any issues.
| Reptur wrote:
| Speaking of E2EE, does anyone have suggestions on a good
| alternative?
| gmhafiz wrote:
| https://syncthing.net
| [deleted]
| ehPReth wrote:
| Messages store/sync with iCloud is another absolute abomination
| for me. Endless frustration. Messages on my devices do not
| properly offload, syncing is broken to the point messages are
| missing, and stuff like search/attachments just break sometimes.
| I've waited at least two major OS updates and nothing's improved.
| You think they'd focus on such a core functionality.
|
| Sure, I have 126GB 'in the cloud' apparently, but come on. The
| only fix I could see was to start fresh: so I set up a fresh
| Messages app on macOS, left it to sync overnight with the screen
| on until the "Downloading messages from iCloud banner" went away
| and made sure the important conversations showed "0 images in
| iCloud".
|
| I then exported what I could via unofficial tools but I still
| feel like I've lost data, which is painful for me. Such as,
| searching my earliest known message via another backup showed it
| in the search results on macOS, but clicking on it showed nothing
| but a blank conversation. It wasn't even in Messages' SQLite DB
| after multiple "Sync Now"s and restarts. How the heck did it get
| that bad? Are the PMs at Apple just that misaligned?
|
| I finally tried deleting the most problematic conversation, which
| went "ok" on the Mac at first, but caused the apps on my iPhone
| and iPad to do nothing but crash on open. When the Mac synced
| next, the conversation reappeared with our past messages, but
| with random gaps in the history (e.g. messages from yesterday,
| then a week ago, maybe a month before that, etc -- so a
| incomplete/weirdly ordered deletion). What a bloody mess. I ended
| up doing a "Disable & Delete" on iCloud Messages. Now I have to
| wait the the 30 day waiting period for Apple's systems to wipe
| hopefully wipe the data in that bucket if I feel like trying
| again. All this certainly does not give me confidence in using
| iMessage (even with Messages in iCloud turned off) in the future.
|
| ------
|
| I'm just.... very very frustrated. How can they take the most
| precious of their users' data and give no fucks about it? The
| same thing with "shared photo albums" where it's not (or wasn't)
| immediately obvious that they re-compress all images and videos
| to much lower quality because I guess they didn't feel like
| deciding whose iCloud storage it would take up. So now my friend
| and I have photos and videos that are irrevocably, unless we go
| digging and find the originals we hopefully have elsewhere,
| compressed.
|
| And now iCloud Drive as in the article? A team needs to be formed
| at Apple to have a long hard look at how they're handling their
| users' data and ensure it's done with the _utmost_ of care. This
| should be a wakeup call to other companies as well. Users are
| entrusting you with their live 's precious moments, or even their
| worst of times that may _need to_ or _want to_ be recalled upon
| later and you should be a good steward of that data. In the case
| of Apple, at least provide a reliable way to backup or export
| data such as Messages in iCloud, then perhaps I 'd have a bit
| more than my many wasted hours fighting with your software and
| _hoping_ that I have everything.
|
| "Move fast and break things" really was a terrible mantra.
| threeseed wrote:
| > When the Mac synced next, the conversation reappeared with
| random messages in it
|
| Are you saying that you saw other people's messages ?
|
| Because this would be one of the worst security issues in
| history if it were the case.
| ehPReth wrote:
| Sorry, I tried to edit my post to clarify that better. What I
| meant was something like it reappeared with some messages
| between from yesterday, then the week before, but not very
| cohesive. Like some deletes failed or something. It was like
| a chosen few messages survived, and waiting longer didn't
| seem to have any effect on them disappearing.
|
| I'm sad I had to delete the conversation, but this wasn't the
| first time I was sent an image or something and it.. just
| wouldn't be there on a device and there was no way to make it
| download. So it _seemed_ something was corrupt, or
| misbehaving.
|
| (As an aside while trying to sort everything out over the
| past day or so, a message from someone else was _only_ on my
| iPad afterwards (it disappeared from my Mac and iPhone), and
| toggling sync did not cause it to propagate anywhere..)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > When the Mac synced next, the conversation reappeared with
| random messages in it
|
| Now consider that courts will use this evidence in case of a
| crime being suspected. And they will presume Apple's backups to
| be more reliable source of information that anything you can
| produce.
|
| In Britain this happened, we sent over 500 people to prison for
| stealing money, but it turned out the IT system was bug ridden
| and didn't sync transactions properly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
| ehPReth wrote:
| Holy crap that's terrifying! Thanks for the link
| aj7 wrote:
| This is great advice. I was planning to become more iCloud
| centric after having a hassle with Google Drive no longer
| mounting on my 2013 10.14 Macbook. (This necessitates a clumsy
| 2-step process to use Drive on this computer.)
|
| Now, I'll live with this hassle and Drive supports conflicted
| copies.
|
| Dropbox has always worked the best. But I'm through with them
| thanks to their heavyhanded shakedown of me by reducing free
| storage from 5GB to 2 in an attempt to get me to pay. Alter
| cockers don't pay: we can't just go on LinkedIn to get a raise.
| pstrateman wrote:
| I mean 10.14 doesn't receive security updates anymore does it?
| dpedu wrote:
| The cloud is just someone else's computer.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| What does that have to do with the behavior of conflict
| resolution?
| superq wrote:
| Not your cloud, not your files.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Not your street, not your road, not your right of way. Not
| your air, not your breath. Not your sunlight, not your tan.
| Not your water supply, not your legionella's disease.
|
| 'If you don't own it, you have no rights' leads to a dark
| place.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Maybe iCloud _should_ be regulated as a utility by the
| government and held to a higher standard... _but it isn
| 't._ Plan accordingly.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| More like "not your merge tool, not your merge preference"
| _I guess?_
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Is there a way to backup icloud (esp photos)?
|
| The old saying is - it's not backed up if it's in less than two
| places.
| gerdemb wrote:
| I'm developing a Mac app for backing up iCloud Photos here
|
| www.ibeni.net
| neoromantique wrote:
| NextCloud, but the experience is fairly frustrating (gotta open
| the app manually quite often).
|
| Google Photos had better hooks previously, and I can't tell if
| new iOS limits that shaft NextCloud also affect Google Photos,
| since I don't use it for a while.
| ezfe wrote:
| Yeah, if you don't have Optimize Storage enabled then any
| backup software will be sufficient.
|
| If you don't have enough local storage you need to be more
| mindful.
| antonkar wrote:
| And if you keep files in iCloud Drive, your iPhone can remove the
| local copy any time.
|
| So if you want your files to be synced and to be 100% sure you'll
| have a local copy - you should keep the same file in iCloud Drive
| and in the "On My iPhone" folder. This is the reason Apple Books,
| Numbers and all the apps that use iCloud Drive remove local
| copies all the time.
|
| I made a simple note-taking app using iCloud Drive - iCloud was
| greedily removing a 2 kb txt-file when the app was closed
| (sometimes it wasn't removing - it's quite random). It doesn't
| matter if you have a lot of storage space - iCloud still can
| remove the local version of a file you constantly use.
|
| The Apple developer support said nothing can be done. Even for a
| developer there is no way to mark a file as never to be removed.
|
| P.S. In their official docs Apple actually recommends to keep all
| the user's files in iCloud Drive and _not_ to keep a copy "On My
| iPhone"
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I use multiple cloud storage services for redundancy than
| periodically rsync from cloud storage to a local device for
| private, local backup using rclone[1]
|
| I'm sure there are downsides but I like the benefit of passive
| image backup and periodic sync.
|
| 1 - https://rclone.org/
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| iCloud is notably missing from rclone, as well as almost all
| third party sync client. I can't use iCloud because as far as I
| know there is no way to sync it on Linux. Even OneDrive has an
| unofficial client as well as rclone.
| sneak wrote:
| A much better reason to not use iCloud Drive is due to the fact
| that it's not end to end encrypted. Everything you store in it is
| readable by Apple sysadmins, support reps, and anyone who can
| compel them (like the US government can, without a warrant now).
|
| Don't use non-e2ee services.
|
| (Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using
| it because it is off by default and buried in settings.)
|
| I use syncthing (e2ee, free software) to keep my files on all my
| machines. It has sane conflict handling and nice versioning
| backups. It even supports untrusted sync-only devices that never
| see plaintext so you can run a node on a vps or somewhere offsite
| safely.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| You are able to turn on end-to-end encryption on your iCloud
| account by going to the setting 'advanced data protection'.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212520
| [deleted]
| aaomidi wrote:
| If you're reading this comment, you can also find out that you
| can turn on e2ee. (Maybe you should lead with that :P)
|
| iCloud Drive is like, one of the only providers that has e2ee.
| dannyphantom wrote:
| On iOS:
|
| Settings > AppleID > iCloud > Advanced Data Protection
|
| You'll see 'Add Recovery Contact' and underneath it you'll
| see 'Recovery Key' 'Off>'
|
| Tap into it, agree to the notice, you'll get a 28
| alphanumeric key and then re-enter that same key to finish
| the set-up.
| photonerd wrote:
| They really should have it use a pass phrase. Much easier
| to remember
| fh9302 wrote:
| How is manually turning on iCloud E2EE different to manually
| searching a provider that supports E2EE by default? This isn't
| like messaging where the other person also needs E2EE enabled.
| sneak wrote:
| The difference is that you know the provider is willing to
| ship surveillance-enabling footguns. They don't regard e2ee
| as core and necessary functionality.
|
| Safe and secure providers will never touch the plaintext of
| any user ever, regardless of the user's configuration (or
| lack of it).
|
| An example (although not in the e2ee sense) is that time
| Dropbox allowed logins to any account with any password
| provided. It illustrates that having a basic test suite over
| authentication systems wasn't important to them.
| sxg wrote:
| Worth noting a practical counter argument against e2ee: the
| vast majority of people are much more susceptible to losing all
| of their data because they forget or lose their encryption key
| compared to having their data compromised by admin staff or
| governments.
|
| While I'd love to turn on e2ee, I don't trust myself enough to
| not lose the encryption key.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > I don't trust myself enough to not lose the encryption key
|
| If you're using a password manager, you can put the key in
| there. In effect this backs up the key (encrypted) to every
| device you install the password manager on, plus a cloud
| backup depending on what manager you're using.
| ls612 wrote:
| I enabled Advanced Data Protection and put the recovery key
| in an encrypted 7zip file, then uploaded that file to
| Onedrive and Backblaze also picked it up. Every now and then
| I have a reminder on my phone to test-decrypt the recovery
| key locally to make sure I don't forget the encryption key.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I do not know your threat model, but maybe keep a physical
| backup of the key?
| ls612 wrote:
| I'm not sure what that would solve? I'm fairly confident
| in my backup system it follows 3-2-1 so a paper printout
| seems unnecessary and would possibly weaken security?
| fbdab103 wrote:
| It would eliminate that fear of forgetting the key.
|
| Again, it comes down to your threat model. Key stored in
| more locations is potentially compromising security, but
| is a trade-off everyone has to consider. It still
| prevents disinterested drag-net style data leakage.
|
| If you are targeted by the big bad, I doubt my
| operational security would be sufficient to protect me
| from a motivated attacker. I suspect that there are
| vulnerabilities in my TPM/random number
| generators/encryption software that are exploitable. An
| evil maid or even just a camera positioned over my
| keyboard would probably be sufficient to grab my data.
| Plus those $5 wrenches.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Do you think "the vast majority of people" know (or even
| want to know) how to create an encrypted 7zip file, let
| alone do a dry run of decryption at some regular cadence?
|
| You can barely convince the average user to set up their
| own backups, and of the users that do, how many do you
| think test their backup recovery procedures?
| eviks wrote:
| Then give the encryption key to a few people, there is at
| least 1 person you trust not to lose it?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Indeed, just print multiple copies on paper. The digital
| attack vector and physical one almost never intersect.
|
| I think it's less about protecting yourself against
| targeted attack, and more as a defence gains snooping and
| physhing and some gathering dirt.
| [deleted]
| DavideNL wrote:
| There is a recovery method for this too: a recovery contact:
|
| _" If you enable Advanced Data Protection and then lose
| access to your account, Apple will not have the encryption
| keys to help you recover it -- you'll need to use your device
| passcode or password, a recovery contact, or a personal
| recovery key. Because the majority of your iCloud data will
| be protected by end-to-end encryption, you'll be guided to
| set up at least one recovery contact or recovery key before
| you turn on Advanced Data Protection. "_
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
| aroman wrote:
| surely it's easier to just click a button and turn on e2ee in
| icloud than change your entire cloud storage provider...
| ben_w wrote:
| If you care about that, no provider is really safe (not
| everyone will copy LavaBit and close the business in response
| to being ordered to secretly reveal keys or otherwise allow
| snooping); however you can still make sure the thing being
| synchronised is an encrypted disk image or whatever.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and
| buried in settings.
|
| I'm using it. And I'm perfectly okay with this being the
| default behaviour.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| But doesn't that conflict with this articles complaint: version
| conflicts?
|
| Much easier to handle version conflicts if the file isn't a
| black box.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Don't use non-e2ee services.
|
| >(Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is
| using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.)
|
| These are contradictory statements. It IS e2ee. I can easily
| convince friends and family to click through two menus to
| enable it. I can't easily convince my friends and family to go
| through the effort of installing syncthing on multiple devices
| and then go through with the configuration of them.
|
| It's great you're a syncthing advocate, but telling people that
| icloud drive is bad just because they don't enable a setting
| that could cause an average user to lose all of their data if
| they lose the key is a little ridiculous. I _GUARANTEE YOU_
| that your grandmother would MUCH rather be able to call Apple
| to get her pictures of little johnny back when she forgets her
| password than have it "more secure by default".
| judge2020 wrote:
| And for many people, a paper that enables they recover their
| account feels (and likely is) much more assuring than the
| possibility of never getting in because you forgot things
| like when you created the account or any number of years-old
| purchases. The paper will live in a safe right next to other
| important documents like their Social Security Card or
| Passport.
| amelius wrote:
| What good is e2ee if Apple employees can just VNC into your
| phone like another commenter said?
| tw04 wrote:
| >What good is e2ee if Apple employees can just VNC into
| your phone like another commenter said?
|
| That would be the same regardless of whether you were using
| icloud or syncthing...
|
| The commenter hasn't actually linked any sort of proof or
| citation (at the time I'm writing this), and assuming it
| exists at all, it requires you to accept the inbound
| connection in the first place. My guess is they're
| extremely confused about the new switch control function
| that allows remote access, not some nefarious Apple
| backdoor like you're insinuating.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205644
| amelius wrote:
| > Requires you to accept the inbound connection in the
| first place
|
| It's all too simple to click "OK" in an inattentive
| moment.
| fh9302 wrote:
| It's purely a video feed similar, it doesn't give the
| support employee direct access to the device. It's
| similar to screen sharing with FaceTime:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212734
| photonerd wrote:
| You have to give them permission. No different to any RDP
| session
| DavideNL wrote:
| > "It IS e2ee."
|
| Well, not really...:
|
| _" Encryption of certain metadata and usage information:
| Some metadata and usage information stored in iCloud remains
| under standard data protection, even when Advanced Data
| Protection is enabled. For example, dates and times when a
| file or object was modified are used to sort your
| information, and checksums of file and photo data are used to
| help Apple de-duplicate and optimize your iCloud and device
| storage -- all without having access to the files and photos
| themselves. Representative examples are provided in the table
| below. ......"_
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
|
| For example, file names in iCloud are not e2e, etc. etc.
| sneak wrote:
| Oh, so even when you think your files are private, Apple
| uploads content checksums unencrypted that allows Apple to
| know what files you have, and networks of other users that
| also have those same unique files.
|
| This is a huge privacy issue.
| fh9302 wrote:
| According to your own link file names in iCloud Drive are
| E2EE.
| tikkun wrote:
| What's the best alternative to iCloud Drive for macOS?
|
| Dropbox is so heavy and uses system resources, I'd love a
| lightweight one that I can trust
| [deleted]
| bayindirh wrote:
| New Dropbox is using Apple's file provider and using ~500 MB of
| RAM. 322 MB for the app itself, and 177MB for the file
| provider.
|
| If you want, there are tons of applications which can talk with
| Dropbox, with varying levels of capabilities.
| clnq wrote:
| Hah, maybe this shows my age, but half a gig of ram for a
| file syncing service sounds like way too much. I just looked
| up the new MacBook Airs, and they only have 8 gig of sys
| memory. The Dropbox share then sounds like it's quite a lot
| for one service.
|
| Why is it so memory-intensive anyways?
| bayindirh wrote:
| 177MB is acceptable for a file provider I think, but the
| other ~300 MB is too much for my taste, too. Dropbox is
| running on a custom Python interpreter with
| obfuscated/encrypted Python code since forever. This why it
| needs that much RAM.
|
| Yes, it's borderline Electron levels of resource waste, but
| that thing works, and I can't complain.
|
| While Apple can manage that 8GB of RAM relatively well,
| 16GB RAM is a must on any Mac which is used for serious
| work.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _While Apple can manage that 8GB of RAM relatively
| well, 16GB RAM is a must on any Mac which is used for
| serious work._
|
| I think developers all using higher end hardware than the
| common base models is a big part of the reason bloat like
| this exists is a problem in the first place. You've got
| programmers with 128 GB of ram and 32 CPU cores writing
| application software for people with 8GB of ram. A few
| hundred megabytes is nothing to the developer, but
| substantial to the common user who is also trying to use
| the same machine for several other things simultaneously.
| bayindirh wrote:
| As a developer poisoned by Demoscene, I'm very aware of
| memory usage of the things I develop, but I'm aware that
| I'm in the minority here.
|
| Most developers and companies want to minimize
| development time and sweat. Instead, they want to push
| their MVP out of the door and iterate quickly. This
| results in tons of imported libraries for single
| functions, unoptimized code, cruft and bloat, which I
| really don't like. However, even if all the things are
| optimized reasonably well, my point stands, because
| running things add up.
|
| Currently, besides two browsers (Firefox and Safari), I
| have Microsoft Excel, Obsidian, Spotify, Terminal, Apple
| Mail, Dropbox, Nextcloud, TextExpander, Viscosity and
| Amphetamine open. Currently 13,43GB of RAM is used
| alongside ~700MB of swap. Most of this is consumed by my
| Firefox tabs and WindowServer on macOS.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| I can recommend getting a Nextcloud instance on a third-party
| cloud provider (I'm using Hetzner) and using the Nextcloud
| apps. Fast and lightweight!
| nurettin wrote:
| Why not keep the master copy somewhere else and rsync to icloud
| drive every x minutes?
| dominikmayer wrote:
| In case anyone at Apple is reading this: I filed feedback
| FB11889594 in December 2022.
| layer8 wrote:
| As an aside, shouldn't "(John Doe's conflicted copy)" rather be
| "(John Doe's conflict _ing_ copy)"? I feel conflicted about the
| former. ;)
| alexpotato wrote:
| I had a similar experience:
|
| - My wife had cloud sync on her iPhone for Notes
|
| - I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for
| her
|
| - She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes??
| What did you do?"
|
| - I break out in a cold sweat
|
| - I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app
|
| - I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the
| Notes
|
| - We call Apple
|
| - The support person ended up figuring out that we could
| essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they
| wouldn't be wiped out.
|
| It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through
| it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more
| warning/pop ups of the full impact of this.
|
| PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into
| your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for
| permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this
| is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in
| action.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| > PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into
| your phone and view things, change settings etc.
|
| I'd love to be able to do that too when troubleshooting my
| mom's iPhone over a voice call (or trying to).
| mcint wrote:
| I want Apple to never make this available to 3rd parties. I
| wonder if, and hope, MDM can disable this support function
| too.
| darknavi wrote:
| You kinda already can:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/teamviewer-
| quicksupport/id6616...
|
| I really want this for my parents who live two states away.
| skibble wrote:
| Fire up the built-in Screen Sharing app, type their Apple
| ID email address in and hit connect. It should bring up a
| prompt their end that they can accept and you can then
| observe/control their screen!
|
| I use this all the time for tech support (for family and
| work).
| acheong08 wrote:
| IOS?
| [deleted]
| dividuum wrote:
| Facetime supports screen sharing:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212734
| chatmasta wrote:
| Hm, any details on that "VNC" functionality? Is it iPad only,
| or iOS too? Was the approval request a system pop up? Did it
| open a named application? Did you see what they did on the
| screen when they were on it? Has this been written about
| anywhere?
| fh9302 wrote:
| You can find some more information here: https://www.reddit.c
| om/r/apple/comments/5mnpt2/comment/dc5n4...
|
| It's similar to FaceTime screen sharing, the support employee
| can only see a video feed of your screen but can't directly
| interact with it.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212734
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201370
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| update : i screwed up the link above. thanks to adjacent
| comment for noticing.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205644
|
| supposedly however switch control works to control other
| devices on the same wifi network. perhaps there's a vpn
| trick in the support side to leverage it over the internet
| at large.
| saurik wrote:
| This is an article about Switch Control, which is an
| accessibility feature for people with (extremely) limited
| dexterity, not a remote control feature for customer
| support.
| ezfe wrote:
| It's supported on Mac/iPad/iPhone and you get a popup
| granting approval. It shows the standard screen sharing UI
| while the session is ongoing.
| ashildr wrote:
| IIRC turning off sync asks you this question: "Are you sure you
| want to continue? All iCloud notes will be removed from your
| iPhone."
|
| I feel as if your wife's Problem was not Apple but the person
| administering her iOS devices.
| smacau wrote:
| [dead]
| Affric wrote:
| You say that but there should be an easy/painless way to get
| out of iCloud.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| In this case there is. You view the main page of notes and
| it shows the notes under "iCloud". Create a local folder,
| move the notes over, and disable iCloud. Easy peasy
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into
| your phone and view things, change settings etc. _
|
| Am I the only one seeing this as a potential security
| vulnerability? Is there a way to permanently disable this?
| Zetobal wrote:
| Everything is a potential security vulnerability...
| randyrand wrote:
| And why phones are routinely hacked
| tredre3 wrote:
| Not excusing the footgun but I'm honestly amazed you could get
| an Apple rep to help you with notes syncing, let alone recover
| them. And they helped even if it seems like it was your own
| fault!
|
| My employer pays (a lot) for Google products and even then
| there's no way they would ever help with that, let alone on the
| phone.
|
| In the past I did get a rep on the phone to help with things
| like access control but I can already hear her tell me
| (politely) to get lost if I needed help with Keep notes
| disappearing (which they occasionally do!).
| xeromal wrote:
| "Why do you always have to tinker!?!"
|
| I'm sure you got an asswhooping. haha
| deanCommie wrote:
| As he should've.
|
| Phones are individual/personal.
|
| Even if the iCloud account is on a shared plan, and one
| member of the family is responsible for managing it, they
| should not be making changes to any INDIVIDUAL device
| settings without checking with that device owner.
|
| I would be livid if my partner had done that for me because
| they "thought 'we' probably didn't need it, so I turned it
| off for 'your' iPhone"
| sshine wrote:
| I accidentally closed my wife's tabs once.
|
| She didn't say anything.
|
| But I'm not doing that again.
| concinds wrote:
| If you did what I'm thinking of, you could have just turned
| sync back on and all the notes would have reappeared.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| This. Turning sync off shouldn't delete notes from iCloud. It
| just doesn't sync the notes from iCloud to the specific
| device in question so they are not visible from that device.
| To confirm OP could have logged in icloud.com from browser
| and seen the notes there. Then you can decide on a per-device
| basis whether you want to sync notes and have them be visible
| on that specific device.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear
| in any of the messaging.
|
| You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this
| device", but _without_ any kind of reassurance that "all 172
| are still present in iCloud".
|
| And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to
| take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in
| the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally
| also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and
| most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not
| specifially with Apple but all around.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yes a million times. But it's not even just iCloud -- it's
| something fundamental to so much Apple software.
|
| The same thing happens to me repeatedly when I'm highlighting
| PDF's using Books -- every so often, I go back to a PDF and
| discover multiple pages of my most recent highlights are missing.
| It saves highlights as you go along, but sometimes for whatever
| mystery reason, it decides that the version of your PDF from
| 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45.
|
| These problems, of Apple silently overwriting newer content with
| an older version, have been going on for at least a decade at
| this point.
|
| And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built
| into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been
| fixed.
| camel_gopher wrote:
| Most of their iCloud infra is built on instances of Cassandra.
| There's a good paper on it which I can't find right now.
| jnieminen wrote:
| Here is some HN on that
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124631
| ben_w wrote:
| > And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever
| built into the system in the first place, and how it still
| hasn't been fixed.
|
| Because the two hardest problems in software are cache
| invalidation, naming things, off by one errors, and buffer
| overflows from a lack of array index enforcement.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Surely a company stuffed with billions of dollars is
| incapable of solving this either by enabling conflict
| handling or some ingenious methods.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| All those billions of dollars are focused on making sure
| you can't replace your screen with an aftermarket part.
| stateofinquiry wrote:
| Interesting point. I have used Apple computers on and off over
| the years, most recently from 2015- earlier this year. I think
| you are on to something re: philosophy. On the hardware side I
| remember when they did away with floppy disks (I'm getting
| old), optical drives, whole cpu architectures (3x!), etc. They
| do cut pretty brutally, and I guess when it comes to iCloud
| this seemingly extends to your files.
|
| I'm not going to say its all bad, but it is less and less my
| style (the older I get, especially).
| user_7832 wrote:
| The other thing about Apple's software is that it neither
| fails gracefully nor does it warn the user. They give an
| appearance of "everything is fine" even when it isn't. They'd
| rather have an app crash and throw you to the homescreen
| rather than give an "app not responding" warning.
| babuskov wrote:
| > decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest
| main one, not the one from 11:45.
|
| Wrong clock on some of the servers?
| crazygringo wrote:
| No because it's all local on my device. That's my point --
| it's not just an iCloud thing, it's a local thing too.
|
| (And I long ago turned off iCloud for Books hoping it would
| fix the problem, but it didn't. Which makes me suspect it's
| some kind of "local mode" for iCloud that's still open to
| these bugs.)
| kccqzy wrote:
| A long time ago I had a junior developer store the internal
| storage used by Docker on iCloud Drive. He then suffered multiple
| weird file version issues inside the containerized app inside
| Docker before he stopped doing that.
| treyd wrote:
| I'm curious as to why he would think that's a good idea. It's
| clearly designed for simple kinds of access patterns with user-
| edited documents.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| It is storage. Rightly or wrongly, most people are going to
| think that one storage location is as good as another.
|
| I would assume that syncing would get bogged down (re-syncs
| full blobs rather than incremental bytes) rather than expect
| any kind of data integrity problem.
| user_7832 wrote:
| In addition, if they'd use Google Drive I'm 80% sure they
| wouldn't have had the same issue.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| clnq wrote:
| I too lost quite a few files with iCloud Drive a while ago. I
| think there might have even been a second file sinkhole, as some
| of my files disappeared entirely off iCloud Drive circa 2015,
| without showing up in the deleted/recoverable file list they had
| if you logged into iCloud over the web. That's not what the
| author describes.
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| Last time I checked, there is no file versioning for _arbitrary_
| file type on iCloud, meaning that if I made a mistake and
| modified a file by error, there is no way to get the old file
| back. I decided that I was not going to put any important
| document on iCloud but should rely on Dropbox or Google Drive.
|
| (It seems that certain apps -- the type that I never use --
| support file versioning within the app. That's not useful.)
| chazeon wrote:
| iCloud has become a real nightmare when I try to build something
| in Swift Playground and open it also on Xcode on a Mac. On iPad I
| was constantly reminded of conflicts, saying that the file is
| edited elsewhere, while in fact it was just I leave the Xcode
| window open. Sometimes it just revert to an older version. It is
| really annoying.
| threeseed wrote:
| This has nothing to do with iCloud.
|
| It's an issue with Xcode/Swift Playground not supporting
| concurrent access to a shared project.
|
| Any app on any platform that doesn't support this use case will
| exhibit similar behaviour.
| andybak wrote:
| Yeah. But also no.
|
| iCloud most definitely adds to the problem.
| threeseed wrote:
| You would have exactly the same issue with Google Drive or
| Dropbox.
|
| Changing a shared resource in two apps at the same time
| will usually cause conflicts unless the app has been
| specifically designed to support this collaborative style
| use case.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Stop putting your work directly on a network share? Maybe I'm
| weird but for 20+ years I always used network shares for backups,
| or sharing of data. Never to store my live work, that's always on
| my local disk. Why else have a local disk?
|
| People put way too much trust in these computers. It feels like
| we're learning the same lessons over and over again. If you had
| to put your trust in 1) your local disk, or 2) a cloud service,
| then local disk always wins. Common sense.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| My mom is 70 and for as long as the app comes loaded on her
| phone, she'll never learn this lesson. She doesn't even begin
| to have enough understanding about stuff like this to be
| skeptical about it. There have to be protections in place for
| her, and people like her who are likely to believe anything a
| company claims without ever reading the fine print.
| frenchman99 wrote:
| That's not at all common sense. People that use multiple
| devices may want to put everything in the cloud service so as
| to access the same version on all devices.
| LoganDark wrote:
| This is what Syncthing is for: everything stays on your local
| file system, but different local file systems are kept in
| sync.
| runjake wrote:
| Plot twist: I get far more sync conflicts with SyncThing
| than I do with iCloud Drive.
|
| Granted, I'm using SyncThing between 3 different OS
| platforms.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Syncthing has pretty basic conflict resolution and
| depends on the devices being online at the time of the
| conflict, so that's expected. It does, however, keep
| everything on the file system, and even allow you to move
| files to a trash rather than completely deleting them if
| they're deleted on another device. Hasn't saved my ass
| yet but maybe one day it will.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm confused by the doubling down here, the bigs all sell
| cloud storage for precisely this use case. Syncthing might
| certainly well be better, but I've never heard of it, and
| billions have heard of iCloud.
|
| It's besides the point: it's certainly not indicative of
| whether or not it's common sense that iCloud intends to
| sync documents.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I'm not really doubling down on anything. I personally
| used Syncthing to keep two computers in sync while I was
| transitioning to a new one. Paying for cloud storage
| would have been unnecessary in my case. I did have iCloud
| before that, but I can't access that anymore ever since
| my Mac broke.
|
| I do pay for cloud storage to sync my reMarkable 2,
| mostly because they'll void my warranty if I don't.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Malware built into iOS makes it impossible to install
| Syncthing[0], which is a problem for most of the people who
| use iCloud tp sync their files.
|
| [0] https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > People that use multiple devices may want to put everything
| in the cloud
|
| Those people may learn the hard way that deleting documents
| on one device syncs that deletion to other devices in the
| same way that making changes to a document on one device
| syncs the changes to other devices.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| iCloud isn't a "network share", it's a cloud-synced folder with
| attached services. And copying files to either isn't "backups."
|
| You don't actively collaborate on anything with anyone?
|
| You've never worked at an org where the network shares are
| snapshotted and backed up, but desktops aren't?
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| I agree with you but we seem old men screaming at the clouds.
|
| Let's meet halfway: use rclone sync to get the cloud up to date
| with your local data.
|
| And, when out of alpha, you can also use rclone bisync.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Or Dropbox and choose "online only".
|
| For my off site backup I have a computer which syncs
| everything to local storage. I guess I don't defend against
| malicious intent or "delete it all" software bugs but that
| tends to end up as en exercise in insanity.
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| Storing directly on Dropbox is 5x time slower than on
| 'normal' filessystem.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Which is why I treat my computer as a thin client unless
| it is in the Dropbox folder.
|
| For example, every single line of code is simply a
| scratchpad if I don't sync it to a remote git instance.
| runjake wrote:
| iCloud Drive _is_ on the local disk -- in ~
| /Library/Containers. It is then synced to/from the cloud.
|
| Your point remains, but for cloud sync, though.
| iterminate wrote:
| Devices are just an interface for a lot of people, they might
| use dozens of devices during the period we (nerds) own a single
| computer. From borrowing their friends tablet, to changing
| their phone, to using a computer at a library or their office,
| they don't have a stable local disk. _The cloud_ is far more
| stable.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Local disks fail, and backups suck to restore, it takes time,
| and it's time you never planned on spending at the moment.
|
| Buy/build a NAS, fill it with SSD's, run raid10, run fast
| networking, and then back the NAS up to the cloud, use the NAS
| for hot data. That way, when a drive fails, you swap in a new
| one, and forget about it, no downtime, no BS.
|
| If your choice is between cloud and local disk, you've already
| failed.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Raid 1 is probably enough for most if you are backing up to
| cloud.
| jtriangle wrote:
| True, but it's also not as reliable on SSD's as people
| think, because they will tend to run out of write endurance
| nearly simultaneously. Still protects you from _actual_
| failures, which is nice, but, far from bulletproof.
|
| Not as much of an issue with HDD's, but, you also need many
| HDD's to achieve the real world performance of even a
| single SSD and that gets expensive in terms of drive cost
| and power usage.
| RajT88 wrote:
| For my setup I use HDD's. I am rarely dumping huge
| amounts of data which needs to go in a hurry. My network
| is 1gbit which is slower than SATA 2 anyways.
|
| I guess YMMV based on how fancy a setup you need.
| [deleted]
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Your advice is valid if you are an employee at a cloud service.
| If I was better at managing hard drives than Dropbox and Apple,
| my job applications wouldn't be rejected.
| 9dev wrote:
| Jep, i am really salty about that too. I used to store my Calibre
| library in the documents folder (where else would it live, right?
| Free backup included!). A while ago I discovered several book
| folders nested in the library that should contain the actual epub
| files... are empty. The directory structure is there, the
| database entries are there, but the book files are gone. Not all
| of them, just about 40%, at random.
|
| Moral of the story, don't store anything in iCloud Drive you
| like, _especially_ not your books.
| kossTKR wrote:
| I once set up drive for a family member with two computers
| effectively nuking their docs slowly without any warning then
| ended up just "hanging".
|
| "Hanging" with no progress bars, no warning, no errors is the
| Apple way of doing things still after 15 years.
|
| I wonder how hard it would be to implement a dev-mode where it
| actually told you why it hung, or what the hell it's "doing" in
| magic (black box garbage) mode.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Here is a terrible flaw in these multi-vendor, heterogeneous
| networked environments.
|
| You can have a filesystem with intuitive semantics, really
| flexible and great access control, resilient and dependable, fast
| and efficient, but in order to share this filesystem across the
| network, with other OSes by different vendors, the lowest common
| denominator is observed. And so all those features are stripped
| away, because only the basics are supported when the OS vendors
| are competing with each other and there are different machines
| with different filesystem drivers, different file managers, and
| apps with different libraries and frameworks for accessing files.
| There is no way to maintain consistency, even with standards-
| based formats and protocols, when so many disparate vendors and
| developers are involved.
|
| Wait, what's that you say? iCloud is maintained by a single
| vendor? You are telling me that Apple has control of every iCloud
| client and server?
|
| Hmm, bad bit of luck there.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| iCloud Drive is a disaster. I had an old MacBook where all the
| hard disk space was taken up with phantom stuff by iCloud Drive
| (it showed as "reserved" or something in Disk Utility) and the
| only way to get the space back was to create a huge file using
| `dd if=/dev/zero` which refilled the space with a "real" file...
| then disable iCloud Drive sharpish.
|
| File management on iOS is a mess too. It's a shame as there's so
| much good stuff in the Apple ecosystem but their cloud file
| storage is not something I want to get involved with any more
| than I need to!
| [deleted]
| jadengeller wrote:
| I have dozens of old Pages documents that are inexplicably now
| "Zero KB". I would not trust iCloud with your data.
|
| (Aside: I really gotta backup my iCloud Photo Library...)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict
| handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors
| like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling,
| leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in
| your backup.
|
| I would like to argue this is at least partly the fault of app
| developers, for adding iCloud support without the conflict
| handling mechanism.
|
| However, why does Xcode, Apple's own in-house app, not support
| conflict handling?! Apple's own software should be setting the
| standard for third-party developers. If they don't handle version
| conflicts, of course no one else will either.
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Hi, original author here. Maybe I wrote it a bit misleading.
| The thing is: It's independent of the editor. Even if you use
| an editor that _does_ support conflict handling you can lose
| the content.
|
| Just assume you write something, save, close the editor and
| never open it again. iCloud might replace the content of that
| file and there is no way for you to know.
|
| The only way to prevent losing your data is setting up a Git
| repository or open _every important file_ regularly in an
| editor that supports conflict handling.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Ah, thank you! I assumed there was some Apple API which is
| supposed to handle this situation (that's how this really
| should work IMO), and the apps mentioned had decided to
| suppress the user message and just pick the newer version or
| some such.
| sneak wrote:
| The system APIs should not silently delete important data when
| the apps haven't implemented the feature.
|
| This is an iCloud bug, not an Xcode one.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm conflicted.
|
| Obviously, deleting data is bad.
|
| However, Dropbox's "(John Doe's conflicted copy)" solution is
| also pretty awful UX. I can understand why Apple would want
| to use its uniquely integrated software ecosystem to come up
| with a better system. I believe they could do it--but they
| clearly have not.
| dominikmayer wrote:
| Agreed. I'm not saying the Dropbox approach is the best. It
| is better than silently deleting content, though.
|
| A different approach would be to add a way to see files
| that have issues. Similar to how Dropbox shows files that
| fail to upload.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| It's awful but still better than silently deleting.
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| Maybe it's awful UX but it's the best you can have and it
| makes good sense, because there is no way Dropbox can
| support merge conflict for arbitrary file types. You might
| as well save all the copies and let user figure it out
| themselves -- user would know much better than Dropbox how
| to handle the situation.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > There is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for
| arbitrary file types.
|
| For Dropbox, I agree. Apple _could_ do it though; that 's
| the advantage of having such great control over your
| ecosystem.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Had something similar occurring with my phone when Notes - and
| only Notes - somehow lost its ability to sync with iCloud
| (silently, of course.) When it eventually got back in touch with
| iCloud, five weeks' worth of notes were obliterated from my
| phone.
| tpmx wrote:
| My main beef with iCloud: They haven't implemented an iOS or web
| version of TextEdit, which is what I use for taking notes.
| mapmap wrote:
| The Notes app?
| tpmx wrote:
| Yes, I understand that is what I'm supposed to use, but I
| like plain text files that can be opened in any app from the
| 1970s and onwards rather than using some app-specific
| database.
|
| TextEdit.app works great on Mac for this, but there is no
| equivalent in iOS or in icloud.com.
| threeseed wrote:
| There are hundreds of text, markdown etc type apps on the
| App Store that are cross-platform and work with iCloud e.g.
| SimpleNote, Notion.
| brainzap wrote:
| For me iCloud drive does sometimes just not sync, and is stuck on
| something, you can see the status of sync in the iCloud Drive
| Finder icon.
|
| Closing all apps on mac and iOS, and running "killall bird" (bird
| is ithe icloud sync service) sometimes fixes it.
| xyst wrote:
| I just avoid using any consumer based cloud storage for
| dynamically changing docs. Just keep it local, then upload the
| final result.
|
| For code, use git locally. If I want to share, then publish to a
| remote VCS (gh, gl, personal gitea instance, ..)
| Zetobal wrote:
| This is the only sensible comment. This whole thread reads like
| a HN parody.
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