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Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

mjtsai.com

111–120 of 131 posts

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#111
post #23

Not surprising. The new Podcasts app deleted years of downloaded podcasts when I updated, including a lot that are no longer hosted on the web. For some reason the "sensible default" in the new app is to delete anything beyond the most recent ten episodes. Now I need to remember to restore from backup before it gets overwritten, heh.

> For some reason Giving you the other side of this: Podcasts was essentially a disk-space-leak made app, if you subscribed to any podcasts that you never actually listened to (but still listened to others, and therefore regularly opened the app.) It would just pile up new unplayed episodes forever, eventually taking up tens of GBs of space, on a device that doesn't have all that much space to spare.

If you have 'Automatic Downloads' enabled in iTunes, which pre-downloads any new tracks you add to your Apple Music library (as opposed to streaming them), a similar thing happens if you're subscribed to any playlists that update frequently.

For example, Apple themselves have a stack of playlists for different genres that are updated on a weekly basis, so after a few months you end up with a ton of downloaded files for songs that are no longer in your library (because they've been rotated out of the playlists).

Problem is, because they're not in your library there's nothing surfaced in the UI, so there's actually no way to know that it doesn't clean up after itself until you go to investigate why you have no disk space.

No idea if this behaviour has survived the transition to Music.app, but considering it seems to just be iTunes with a fresh coat of paint, it wouldn't surprise me.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#112

As a daily Mac user who started to use macOS (OS X) about 7-8 years ago, I find the insurmountable number of bugs of macOS Catalina alarming. Don’t get me wrong, the situation is still much, much compared to Windows or Linux[0], buy it is alarming to see the general quality of macOS software to decrease. I personally think it’s due to Apple engineers trying to do so much; I remember being impressed by the number of n…

I am strongly of the opinion that the fixed yearly release cycle is almost unequivocally bad for macOS (and most years it ain't so great for iOS either -- 13 is still a mess).

My Mac is, and has been for many years, a 100% work machine. 'Leisure' computing for me is done on my phone or iPad, and I think the same likely applies for a lot of Mac users.

The yearly cycle mostly makes sense for iOS because they want flashy new features to go with their flashy new hardware, but the Mac has basically no schedule for hardware updates. Even when they happen, they're usually spec bumps and not the sort of update that requires new user-facing OS features.

Of course I want the Mac and macOS to continue to steadily improve. I love the platform. I am utterly apathetic towards Windows, and using Linux for 8 hours a day at my day job has confirmed that I could not possibly stand to run it full-time on my personal machine. I don't want the Mac to die off. But for the love of god I wish they'd just wait until the software is ready before releasing it.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#113
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Never happened to me, much less "every time". I had some apps break and need update after an iOS update, but not layout problems in apps... at least not in the 50+ non-Apple apps I use...

WhatsApp currently has some weird layout bugs when swiping back to the root view for me. More annoyingly, it seems the changes to how multiple windows are handled has made it so any visible notification will prevent me from interacting with anything except the notification, so I can't ignore them anymore - I have to dismiss them to carry on using the phone.

I see. Don't use WhatsApp anymore, so can't check.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#114

I wish I only lost mail data in the upgrade to Catalina. I lost 400GB of data when the installer repartitioned the hard drive and the files that were in folders in root went bye bye. I know I'm not supposed to put stuff there, but it was a family video project I was putting together for my wife for Christmas, and she would have seen it anywhere else. There should have at least been a notice or a warning or some kind…

sorry to be harsh, but you have only yourself to blame.

1. you know not to put stuff in root. you must have disabled SIP to do this? WHY?

2. ever heard of backups? it is SO easy in mac os.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#115
you people are going batshit crazy over completely unsubstantiated report.

It even says,

> I don’t know whether these are due to Mail bugs or to other factors such as problems on the Mac or with the mail server.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#117
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't obvious at the time, but I think in retrospect the case can be made that Apple's ability to innovate effectively (both in terms of time and quality) died with Jobs. Jony Ive made a good effort to keep pushing hardware design forward, but without Jobs to curb his worst impulses (in my opinion), the end was result was "thinner above all else" (as you mention). If someone can come up with a corporate structure…

> It wasn't obvious at the time, but I think in retrospect the case can be made that Apple's ability to innovate effectively (both in terms of time and quality) died with Jobs. Oh stop. Apple's effectiveness was entirely a product of its time. You had designers building the Zune and calling it competitive but really there was no competition for the products Apple was building for a market that was screaming for a bet…

Apple only kept Java around because coming from Pascal and C++ background they were unsure how the Apple developer community would welcome Objective-C.

When they saw the community had no issue embracing Objective-C that is when they dropped the Java bridge, QT for Java and eventually their own JVM.

Chris Lattner never speaks about MacRuby on his interviews, rather how, like clang before it, Swift started as a side project before being shown to upper management.

According to his interviews, many of the Objective-C 2.0 and later improvements were already a kind of slow roadmap into Swift.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#118
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some reason Giving you the other side of this: Podcasts was essentially a disk-space-leak made app, if you subscribed to any podcasts that you never actually listened to (but still listened to others, and therefore regularly opened the app.) It would just pile up new unplayed episodes forever, eventually taking up tens of GBs of space, on a device that doesn't have all that much space to spare.

> It would just pile up new unplayed episodes forever AKA exactly the desired behavior.

Humans are forgetful, sometimes it’s nice to have machines help us organize things.

Re: Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

#119

I’ve never used Mail because I’ve never felt comfortable with Apple’s apps when it comes to long term data storage. Here Mail is said to delete data. This has happened before, IIRC. Someone in this discussion has written that their old downloaded podcast episodes were deleted on upgrade. In the distant past, Apple has also broken compatibility in data formats (for its iWork apps) and left those who upgraded with almo…

A counter-example I can think of is iPhoto/Photos, which seems to have just gotten better and better for me. But it is tightly integrated with iCloud so if you don’t use that I could see how you consider it to be getting worse and worse.
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