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Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

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Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#51

Post by rapsey »

fulafel wrote: post #40
adt2bt wrote: post #10

It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

> traffic analysis tell the adversary a wealth of information.

When it comes to communication. iCloud is file storage. Data at rest encryption.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#52

Post by alister »

It would be interesting to know how that data breaks down -- like photos vs videos vs software backups vs saved movies, etc. I assume that most people stream movies, TV shows, and music these days, and that few people save them to disk. And even for those that do, Apple could deduplicate (i.e., store exactly one copy of Men in Black even if 100,000 people saved it). Software installs are easily deduplicated as well.

So that leaves personal photos and videos. Apple has about 1 billion active users, so a back of the napkin calculation suggests that each user is storing 8GB of data. That actually sounds quite low. That's 1600 5MB photos without even talking about the crazy storage that personal videos would use.

The article talks about how much Apple stores on Google's servers, but doesn't say how much they store on their own servers or with other third parties. Maybe they have multiple times as much storage on their own servers.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#54

Post by suifbwish »

bushbaba wrote: post #26
bastard_op wrote: post #14

Barbarians at the gate, Google and Amazon slurp it all up eventually. How's those big ones feel inside your budget, Apple.

Flip side. You have no idea if google is actually making a profit on this workload. It might literally be cheaper for apple to use GCP for storage here than doing it themselves.

Either A) it’s cheaper economically or B) apple makes enough on its products where the loss is negligible compared to the work and complexity involved.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#55

Post by SilverRed »

acomjean wrote: post #43
SilverRed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can do the full device backup on anything but icloud and I agree that should change but your own storage has the same access as google does on ios. You can have your own photos app which automatically uploads everything in the photo roll and can delete photos to keep them in sync with your cloud.

Based on what I’m seeing with google one and box’s iOS app, I’m going to agree. You can try to back up your pictures but it’s always a compromise. I ended up just plugging the iPhone into the computer and exporting the photos that way.

iOS is opening up to 3rd party services quite a bit in recent releases. The files app and allowing setting default apps are nice improvements which have come recently. As well as allowing 3rd parties in the find my network.

I think we could see full device backups to other cloud services later. I guess the problem is they would want to provide a specific api for 3rd parties to implement rather than trying to drop a 256GB zip file on google drive with no differential backups.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#56

Post by p0la »

fulafel wrote: post #40
adt2bt wrote: post #10

It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

Very true when each user is accessing its own encrypted data directly. But from what I read here in the comments, Apple is managing encryption on their own HW, which almost surely means that data is read and wrote from Apple’s machines. Such aggregation of read and write calls across users makes access traffic patterns analyses risk fairly minimal...

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#57

Post by deeter72 »

fulafel wrote: post #40
adt2bt wrote: post #10

It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

Why would Google even attempt to spy on those patterns? it serves no purpose and how do you justify employee time spent for such useless things? Not to mention apple proxies all requests through their servers rendering such analysis utterly useless to begin with.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#58

Post by deeter72 »

omegalulw wrote: post #39
bravetraveler wrote: post #2

I guess 8 exabytes doesn't get the same number of clicks Edit: Not really trying to be facetious, but come on. Apple using a lot of storage at a lot of places isn't too surprising

8M terabytes isn't a big number tho. 1TB/person is fairly common these days and Apple has like 900M+ users.

I would say the family 200GB plan is the most common and also I have to say still its way less paying people than I thought it would be.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#59

Post by fulafel »

rapsey wrote: post #51
fulafel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

> traffic analysis tell the adversary a wealth of information. When it comes to communication. iCloud is file storage. Data at rest encryption.

IO requests are communication.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#60

Post by [deleted] »

manigandham wrote: post #49
fulafel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

Like what? What's a practical vulnerability or leak?

[deleted]
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