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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

#71

Post by icebraining »

WalterBright wrote: post #19

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.

I think it's fine if you treat the services as dumb remote hard drives, meaning you expect them to fail at any time and that anyone can simply browse it at will, so you keep other copies elsewhere and encrypt before uploading.

I have my important files backed up to S3 and to a VPS, besides a local HD, using git-annex, and it suffers from none of those problems. If my VPS provider goes bust or S3 eats my data, I just open a new account elsewhere and "git annex copy" the files to it.

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

#72

Post by netheril96 »

_mikz wrote: post #54
jostmey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a sync issue. What happens when the files are still uploading on one device, while being donwloaded on another. Will the files waiting to uploaded disappear?

1) Other devices don't see the files that are still being uploaded 2) Tried creating a folder, uploading 200 MB file in it and moving the folder to to local drive. Works as expected. After upload finished, the folder reappeared with the file in it. So, the files waiting to be uploaded won't disappear.

This seems to contradict the claim in the article. Am I interpreting it wrong?

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

#73

Post by netheril96 »

spost wrote: post #61
netheril96 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for your interest! I would also like it to receive more attention, but I guess technical superiority isn't much correlated with popularity.

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

#74

Post by vacri »

_mikz wrote: post #64
morganvachon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is reproducible, it is recoverable, it is not a problem.

I can't wait to use this excuse for any future bug. "Yeah, it happens, but you can recover from it, so it's not a problem".

Let me try it now with a problem we're having in staging: "You keep getting kicked out, but can log in again and keep working? Yeah, it happens, but you can recover from it. It is not a problem"

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

#75

Post by click170 »

morganvachon wrote: post #57
eclipxe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Purely anecdotal, but it happened to me. I had ripped (using iTunes) about 200 CDs I own, over the course of a couple of months of throwing in a CD whenever I wasn't doing anything too important otherwise. These 200 CDs were joined by about 10GB of legally purchased MP3s from sources other than iTunes. In fact, I've only ever bought two albums on the iTunes store. Anyway, some time after I had ripped and cataloged al…

I've got a very similar anecdote.

Added songs to iTunes outside of the iTunes store, and months later went back to play the song but couldn't find it in iTunes.

The first few times I chucked it up to me being crazy and misremembering but by the third and fourth time I was sure I wasn't.

I started putting my iTunes directory in a git repo but that didn't highlight any files that got spontaneously deleted which made me wonder if they were really gone. I checked the filesystem and they were right there where they should be.

I'm glad to hear that it wasn't just me, for the longest time I though I messed something up because my friends who use the iTunes store almost exclusively had no such problem.

I'm still on the lookout for an acceptable iTunes replacement that is open source and that can talk to my newish iPod. (Smart playlists are a must)

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

#76

Post by droopyEyelids »

markjaquith wrote: post #36
eclipxe wrote: post #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.

So, I verified the bug, but this happened to a friend of mine (she lost gigabytes of data). And Apple Support tried to help, and couldn't, and as a consolation prize she got a Thunderbolt external drive. Which was particularly insulting. "We suck so much at handling your data, you should probably do it yourself!"

That is not particularly insulting. That is the support agent doing more than any other company to compensate for a fuckup.

Particularly insuting would be if they shut down your account after making the complaint, or something like that.

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

#77

Post by tedunangst »

themeekforgotpw wrote: post #25
__david__ wrote: post #24

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.

Did you factor in the possibility that after ten fails the device is wiped?

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

#78

Post by coldtea »

imron wrote: post #52
coldtea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about that. OS X is a mighty fine OS, iOS is the best mobile OS, Logic gets top points as a DAW, etc etc.

OS X was mighty fine. It's been getting progressively worse in my opinion.

I don't see anything really worse about it.

That's just what people like to say without any quantifiable metrics (usually just with some random data points about this or that bug, but not quantifiably compared to previous releases).

Millions of people use it everyday for professional work, including in film and music studios, where stability and timely performance are much more paramount than for some corporate cubicle running Excel.

I've not seen anything actually actively deteriorate. The Finder is much better, Spotlight is much more robust than before, apps run fine, etc.

There have been bad moves, like the change to their custom DNS responder thing which was not ready for production. Or some glitches here and there. But I've seen such things all the way down to 10.1 were I started. There will always be bugs when you add new features (and even when you don't add anything, as technologies around your OS also change).

Plus the upcoming release is a "Snow Leopard" like bugfix affair too, which will help things.

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

#80

Post by wahsd »

protomyth wrote: post #17
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.

"And iBooks dropped all metadata at some point" The worst part of that is that there is no way to manually export that data and back it up yourself. Its worse now because Apple is only providing some information as ebooks and not pdfs. So, I get something that can loose my notes and I cannot print out (sorry, I sometimes like to read on something without an LCD).

I really hope to see in my lifetime a move back to user owned data and a distributed internet again. This whole centralization and proprietary nature of things is really not to my taste. If anyone is going to lose my stuff, I want it to be me or at the very least allow me to back up all my own data to my own backup.

Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I just don't like this whole move to cloud computing and centralized data store.

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