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Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

andykong.org

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Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#11

Post by cnicolaou »

Surprisingly, I've received a similar storage notice from Apple before the holidays and I decided to download all photos/videos into my own media server instead of hosting it on iCloud. There is not an easy, straight-forward way to download your archive from iCloud. I am slowly getting there using multiple machines and devices.

The issue with the recent changes with Apple is that they increase the prices for no good reason. We're always going to take photos/videos and their sizes keep increasing with modern tech and capabilities.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#13

Post by farconics »

Nextgrid wrote: post #9
saagarjha wrote: post #6

I kind of hate opaque cloud solutions like this, because their storage usage is inscrutable and their interfaces are basically never optimized to help you clear things out. Whether that’s intentional and malicious or just not a priority, I don’t really care, I just want to be in control of the stuff I’m using. I have a very similar issue with iMessage in iCloud, and unlike photos, there’s no web interface. You have t…

The opaqueness is definitely a problem. My iMessage database has a corrupted spot somewhere in the message history; if I accidentally make the Messages app read that spot (via searching or scrolling back through old conversations) it'll silently start maxing out the CPU and burning energy for no reason. There is no error message, nothing obviously wrong-looking, and as far as I know everything works.

Sounds like a nightmare. Do you know what could have caused the database corruption?

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#15

Post by o-o- »

Nextgrid wrote: post #9
saagarjha wrote: post #6

I kind of hate opaque cloud solutions like this, because their storage usage is inscrutable and their interfaces are basically never optimized to help you clear things out. Whether that’s intentional and malicious or just not a priority, I don’t really care, I just want to be in control of the stuff I’m using. I have a very similar issue with iMessage in iCloud, and unlike photos, there’s no web interface. You have t…

The opaqueness is definitely a problem. My iMessage database has a corrupted spot somewhere in the message history; if I accidentally make the Messages app read that spot (via searching or scrolling back through old conversations) it'll silently start maxing out the CPU and burning energy for no reason. There is no error message, nothing obviously wrong-looking, and as far as I know everything works.

Oh, so that's what's happening? You made me realise I have the same exact issue!

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#18

Post by mft_ »

Okay, so it could be a bug, but it is possible that iCloud is secretly storing more than one version of the file in some cases? (After all, Apple does similar things with other media files.)

The example given at the end is interesting:

> So iCloud says the video is 128MB, I download it and the video is actually 48MB, and my free storage increases by ~170MB when I deleted it. Interesting!

This suggests that iCloud isn't simply misrepresenting the size of the example file, as then you'd expect that deleting the 128MB file would clear ~128MB of iCloud space. Instead, the deletion clears roughly the space it reports (128MB) plus the space of the downloaded version (48MB): 128MB + 48MB = 176 MB - which might be close enough, allowing for rounding errors, as iCloud reports the free space (from the article's example) to the nearest 10 MB.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#19

Post by Joeri »

abhinavk wrote: post #7
atlas_hugged wrote: post #2

Am I reading this right? If this is widespread, this could be seen as apple bloating figures to push people to upgrade, which could lead to a lawsuit, no? IANAL

If you edit a photo/video in file rather than saving as a new file, iOS retains the original file so that you can undo/revert. It doesn’t show the original anywhere in Photos or iCloud gallery. That might be the reason.

You can also edit with third party software, and they can embed whatever metadata they want to allow those edits to be modified, so there might not actually be an upper bound on how much larger you can make a photo or video by editing.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#20

Post by LUmBULtERA »

That's an interesting bug/problem(?) he ran into.. Though, on the topic of reducing storage usage, in the Photos iOS app, you can remove photo duplicates under "Albums" at the very bottom -- if you have duplicates that it recognizes, there will be a line item for this, otherwise the line item will disappear.
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