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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

#51

Post by Alifatisk »

sandreas wrote: post #40

That's one of the reasons I self-host. I just don't trust the cloud providers regarding clarity and transparency... even if my self-hosted solution was far less reliable, less secure and less performant (I imagine it's not ;), I probably wouldn't change. I personally use immich[1], a very complete solution with iOS / Android App, Server-Component and Sync / Backup option. [1]: https://immich.app/

It looks interesting but the warning at the top tells me I should wait for it to become more stable?

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#52

Post by Alifatisk »

baz00 wrote: post #48
Alifatisk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How? I can only jump from 50 GB to 200 GB when I look at the available plans

Actually I may be wrong there. I was on 200Gb with Apply Family but have stuck 50GB on top of that for £0.99 month. I can only swap that out for a 200GB increment. This is weird because I'm sure you used to be able to do that.

Oh okey, I knew that sounded too good to be true.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#53

Post by asdaq1312512 »

Photos.app doesn't show file size… so I thought, why not build a little Photos.app extension or a separate app that queries for large files?

Turns out that the API doesn't expose "file size", at least I didn't find a straight-forward way.

I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest.

I guess that's why the file sizes differ.

[Edit: someone created an AppleScript to query file sizes - I didn't test it, yet: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000422 ]

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#54

Post by AnonC »

jahnu wrote: post #44
AnonC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search on the messages app is broken for me on iOS and macOS. It really can’t find things that are there. So I have to scroll and look around. The sizes reported are also inaccurate. While iCloud will report some large number, when I dig into the largest messages section it doesn’t show anything close to that size (with just a few items in that list). Since the macOS Messages app is some Catalyst abomination, it won’…

Why are message apps like this? Tons of effort for almost useless stuff like stickers but super basic media management. Even in open source apps where in theory we can contribute functionality like Signal it’s difficult. E.g. it’s impractical to delete lots of media in groups in the iOS app. I added a PR last year to help this but still waiting for a merge even though it has been approved :( Edit: PR for the curious…

Though Telegram’s chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default (and E2EE is not available for group chats), its storage management on device and on the cloud are quite good.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#55

Post by Liftyee »

Alifatisk wrote: post #49

I've tried iCloud, Onedrive, Google Photos. Out of all these three, I stuck with Google Photos on my Iphone. iClouds bad pricing and storage issues led me to switch to Google Photos, It's way better. The lack of native support on iOS can be a little cumbersome though. The only thing I wish these cloud providers offered was a way to deduplicate photos / videos. That would make my life so much easier.

> The only thing I wish these cloud providers offered was a way to deduplicate photos / videos.

Same here ... but of course that would make it easier for customers to not have to pay more, so sadly don't think it's ever happening.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#56

Post by realusername »

Nextgrid wrote: post #33
mojo74 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, this was may take on the article too. I suppose one could download x amount of files from one cloud storage and upload it to another to see if there is any obvious discrepancy. Perhaps Apple are still using their old file system format for icloud? It's been around for a good few years now and perhaps they simply haven't bothered to ever change the type of storage format they use. Maybe those with older account…

I don't believe iCloud is a filesystem, it's not block-level. It's object-level, like S3, with a bunch of OS-side jank to make it look like a conventional directory and filesystem (which often fails miserably and dangerously). It's similar levels of reliability to an FTP account mounted with curlftpfs[1] - except the latter at least fails in understandable ways and can be debugged. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

That's exactly my mental model of it as well, some janky home made s3 fixed with tape. I really advise anybody to save their data somewhere else as well before in inevitably stops working.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#57

Post by znpy »

I'm being sarcastic here, but the solution could be quite simple: iCloud is billing you (both in terms of storage size and money) for both your data and the redundant copies.

Other companies would build the redundancy costs into the final pricing, but Apple is known to "think different".

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#59

Post by captn3m0 »

Alifatisk wrote: post #52
baz00 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I may be wrong there. I was on 200Gb with Apply Family but have stuck 50GB on top of that for £0.99 month. I can only swap that out for a 200GB increment. This is weird because I'm sure you used to be able to do that.

Oh okey, I knew that sounded too good to be true.

I didn’t even get an option for 200GB increment.

Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

#60

Post by Havoc »

sgt wrote: post #47
Havoc wrote: post #3

Good timing..I've been getting the same warning mails (though 50gb). Was planning to go through photos but checking vids first makes sense

Been getting the same warning emails (200GB in my case). So I tried this now, but it doesn't seem to highlight anything after pasting in the gist into Chrome. Does it work for you?

>after pasting in the gist into Chrome.

No idea what this means so can't tell you whether it works for me

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