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How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

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Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#21
post #10
post #6

And iBooks dropped all metadata at some point. The wrong network setting on iTunes nukes all your album art. iCal sync is a cruel joke. The moral is don't use Apple cloud services for anything you care about.

iTunes also used to randomly delete music on updates. And they deliberately deleted non-iTunes Store music at one point (which AFAICT was a separate thing).

The music itself or the playlist? I've seen iTunes corrupt its playlist, but the physical music files always remain. Don't get me wrong, it is still a huge pain in the butt, and one of the reasons I uploaded all of my music to Google Music and got an All Access subscription.

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#22
I think it is safe to say that Apple iCloud is not a backup product, but merely a file synchronisation tool.

I never liked the idea of stub files with tools like this. I used Livedrive a few years ago and the whole stub files gives a false sense of security. The only benefit it provided was I could double click the stub file and prioritise the download.

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#23
> Fine. That’s what dragging a file from one place to another generally does!

To me this is not fine. Usually dragging from a different device(USB Thumbdrive hard drive, SD Card Thumbdrive, ....) should copy the files, and the cloud should be considered as another device.

Could a Mac user confirm if this is the default behavior on Mac devices?

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#24

Giving your data to a third party is a very difficult thing to do. Either their policies and heuristics are not perfect (like this article), they go under and you lose your data and service (probably not the case now with Apple) or they will be compelled by law to share your data with law enforcement. On this last issue, Apple has the reputation of being one of the best technology corporations. However according to t…

> But this blurb fails to mention that the user provided passcode can only be about 15 bits of user supplied entropy…

How do you figure that?

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#25

Giving your data to a third party is a very difficult thing to do. Either their policies and heuristics are not perfect (like this article), they go under and you lose your data and service (probably not the case now with Apple) or they will be compelled by law to share your data with law enforcement. On this last issue, Apple has the reputation of being one of the best technology corporations. However according to t…

> But this blurb fails to mention that the user provided passcode can only be about 15 bits of user supplied entropy… How do you figure that?

Four digits, choice of 10 for each digit.

log(10000)/log(2) ~ 15.

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#26

Yeah, I'm not too interested in using any cloud storage: 1. slow 2. bugs that delete your data 3. company goes bust or dark for whatever reason 4. your private data is available to voyeuristic employees, hackers, spies, advertisers, researchers, monetizers, anyone who offers to buy it, stalkers, dragnets, and anyone who buys their used disk drives on ebay. No thanks.

For personal backup of key files (not endless GBs of movies, just documents and precious pictures) I usually sync a Sparse Disk Bundle[1] with a good AES key. Sure, you have to trust Apple's AES implementation (I don't to any great extent) but it gets you some degree of privacy without much hassle. It is a cheap insurance policy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image . It uses 8MB chunks by default which sync quite quickly.

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#28
post #10
post #6

And iBooks dropped all metadata at some point. The wrong network setting on iTunes nukes all your album art. iCal sync is a cruel joke. The moral is don't use Apple cloud services for anything you care about.

iTunes also used to randomly delete music on updates. And they deliberately deleted non-iTunes Store music at one point (which AFAICT was a separate thing).

Do you have a citation on the deliberately deleting non-iTunes Store music? I've used iTunes since version 3 and updated along the way. I've NEVER had a file deleted (and 95% of my music is non-iTunes Store)

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#29
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201104

>If you need to access a file that you recently deleted, you might be able to recover it from iCloud.com. Sign in to iCloud.com, click Settings > Data & Security, then browse the list of files in the Recover Documents tab. Files will be removed from Recover Documents in 30 days.

Re: How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this blurb fails to mention that the user provided passcode can only be about 15 bits of user supplied entropy… How do you figure that?

Four digits, choice of 10 for each digit. log(10000)/log(2) ~ 15.

You are not limited to four digits.
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