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Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

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Re: Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

#51
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I click "Permanently delete" in the Apple photos app, doing anything other than permanently deleting it is nothing short of a lie

You’re in for a rude awakening then with most file systems then. Delete just means “unlink the pointer to it in the file system” for the vast majority of file systems. It might get deleted when it gets overwritten… sometime in the future maybe. I assume this is exactly what happened here.

However, "unlink the pointer" has been good enough for ages.

The data is effectively deleted short of an application having the privileges to read the underlying raw block device and having an understanding of the raw filesystem structures to be able to search though that unallocated, raw space and reconstruct file entries.

No application outside of special-purpose data recovery apps (and even then you'd need to run them with elevated privileges) would have any reason to be capable of this, so in practice a deleted file means it is deleted from the perspective of the vast majority of applications.

Similarly, SSD TRIM is also irrelevant - TRIM'med space is hidden from the host. Sure, an intentional tool exploiting some undocumented vendor command or side-channel could probably recover it but again you'd have to do this intentionally.

Re: Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you then delete from the Recently Deleted album it says that the photo “will deleted the selected photos from iCloud and all connected devices”. Additionally, at least in iOS 17.5, the Recently Deleted album itself has a disclaimer at the bottom that says that “items will be permanently deleted. This may take up to 40 days.”

"This may take up to 40 days"??? what?! Permanent deletion of local files may take over a month?

iCloud is a pile of crap with eventual consistency everywhere, including some really extreme interpretations of "eventual": I've had deleted "favorite places" on Maps persist for years. Deleting them would hide them from the local device, yet restoring a brand new device would bring them back.

The whole thing feels like it's running on duct tape, wishful thinking and a large chunk of non-technical users that would blame themselves rather than the shitty tech when weird things like this happen.

Re: Apple's photo bug exposes the myth of 'deleted'

#54

It's impractical to delete files from long term storage. Think about a file saved to long term data storage tape. How do you delete that? It would take aeons.

Are you implying when you restore a new iPhone from a cloud backup, Apple hits its tape storage vaults?
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