Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

txfx.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 144 posts

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

#61

Post by spost »

netheril96 wrote: post #48
verytrivial wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I wrote a FUSE filesystem ( https://github.com/netheril96/securefs ) to secure the data that is meant to be synced to the cloud. In principle it is more secure than alternatives because the randomization and authentication of encryption. It encrypts file by file so that no need to sync a huge data when you only change a single file.

I see you submitted this a while back, it's a shame there wasn't much discussion! Seems like a neat idea and (to my naive knowledge of cryptography) a solid implementation.

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

#62

Post by cjensen »

themeekforgotpw wrote: post #45
rimantas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not limited to four digits.

I see. Is there a limit? Does it approach 128 bits?

"Over 90 characters" [1]. At roughly 5 bits per character, that puts it at more than 450 bits.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/05/how-to-set-up-a-complex-p...

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

#63

Post by themeekforgotpw »

cjensen wrote: post #62
themeekforgotpw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Is there a limit? Does it approach 128 bits?

"Over 90 characters" [1]. At roughly 5 bits per character, that puts it at more than 450 bits. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/05/how-to-set-up-a-complex-p...

Nice!

Of course this isn't ever actually used - in practice users choose four to eight digit passcodes.

Users should, if they want to secure their information, use a randomly chosen passcode of approximately 30 digits long.

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

#64

Post by _mikz »

morganvachon wrote: post #59
azinman2 wrote: post #56

Title is misleading. This is an isolated edge case, although clearly one that should be addressed.

Hmm, dragging and dropping files on a Mac isn't an edge case, it's a common activity. The question is, is this bug reproducible? Also, it's reminiscent of the Steam on Linux bug (though not as catastrophic); it's well within the realm of possibility.

Just read other comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9888496 It is reproducible, it is recoverable, it is not a problem.

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

#65

Post by joshstrange »

themeekforgotpw wrote: post #45
rimantas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not limited to four digits.

I see. Is there a limit? Does it approach 128 bits?

You can choose to set a complex password which can be as long as you want and use the full keyboard

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

#66

Post by themeekforgotpw »

joshstrange wrote: post #65
themeekforgotpw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Is there a limit? Does it approach 128 bits?

You can choose to set a complex password which can be as long as you want and use the full keyboard

How difficult is it to configure this? Users should definitely choose passphrases of sufficient length and sufficient types to be secure. This is unfortunately an infamously tricky area of security to get right.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

nickbauman wrote: post #9
jmount wrote: 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.

Apple doesn't have the right organizational structure to support cloud services across apps to a level of consistency and quality that Google and Amazon does. Nathan Taylor explains this quite well. http://praxtime.com/2013/11/03/apple-strat-tax-voice-as-god-...

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by entropie »

Had a similar problem with the dropbbox linux client from the early days.

I installed the script and ran "dropbox" on a new machine. Maybe It was because I created the destination folder before maybe because I had to kill the deamon at sometime to restart... no idea. It begun to delete my entire stuff in the dropbox.

Not really a problem for me because I store no important stuff in it, but i was kinda buffled. Even it could be a mistake by me, this stuff should not happen so fast.

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

#69

Post by gcr »

larrymcp wrote: post #50

I noticed this same phenomenon with all three of the auto-syncing cloud storage services I tested: Apple's iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive. During testing, all three of those services incorrectly deleted files when the cloud service got confused about synchronization. So for the particular application I had in mind, I wasn't able to use any of them and had to write scripts to handle the synchronization…

How did Dropbox do on your test?

I'd love to see a blog post describing your test protocol, if you have time to write one.

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

#70

Post by icebraining »

_mikz wrote: post #37

Isn't this exactly the same thing as someone reported with Google Drive? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612854

Well, not exactly, since GDrive just moves the files to the Trash, it doesn't delete them immediately. The user had to manually purge the Trash after moving the files.

That said, they're both brain-dead UIs, yes.

Post reply on HN