13 ms·

iCloud Drive silently deletes your content

345 points by dominikmayer 3y ago

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup. I would like to argue this is at least partly the fault of app developers, for adding iCloud support without the conflict handling mechanism. However, why does Xcode, Apple's own in-house app, not support conflict handling?! Apple's own software should be setting the standard for third-party developers. If they don't handle version conflicts, of course no one else will either.
- sneak 3y ago
  The system APIs should not silently delete important data when the apps haven't implemented the feature. This is an iCloud bug, not an Xcode one.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    I'm conflicted. Obviously, deleting data is bad. However, Dropbox's "(John Doe’s conflicted copy)" solution is also pretty awful UX. I can understand why Apple would want to use its uniquely integrated software ecosystem to come up with a better system. I believe they could do it—but they clearly have not.
    - dominikmayer 3y ago
      Agreed. I'm not saying the Dropbox approach is the best. It is better than silently deleting content, though. A different approach would be to add a way to see files that have issues. Similar to how Dropbox shows files that fail to upload.
    - Espressosaurus 3y ago
      It's awful but still better than silently deleting.
    - d3w4s9 3y ago
      Maybe it's awful UX but it's the best you can have and it makes good sense, because there is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for arbitrary file types. You might as well save all the copies and let user figure it out themselves -- user would know much better than Dropbox how to handle the situation.
      - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
        > There is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for arbitrary file types. For Dropbox, I agree. Apple could do it though; that's the advantage of having such great control over your ecosystem.
- dominikmayer 3y ago
  Hi, original author here. Maybe I wrote it a bit misleading. The thing is: It's independent of the editor. Even if you use an editor that _does_ support conflict handling you can lose the content. Just assume you write something, save, close the editor and never open it again. iCloud might replace the content of that file and there is no way for you to know. The only way to prevent losing your data is setting up a Git repository or open _every important file_ regularly in an editor that supports conflict handling.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    Ah, thank you! I assumed there was some Apple API which is supposed to handle this situation (that's how this really should work IMO), and the apps mentioned had decided to suppress the user message and just pick the newer version or some such.
tpmx 3y ago
My main beef with iCloud: They haven't implemented an iOS or web version of TextEdit, which is what I use for taking notes.
- mapmap 3y ago
  The Notes app?
  - tpmx 3y ago
    Yes, I understand that is what I'm supposed to use, but I like plain text files that can be opened in any app from the 1970s and onwards rather than using some app-specific database. TextEdit.app works great on Mac for this, but there is no equivalent in iOS or in icloud.com.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      There are hundreds of text, markdown etc type apps on the App Store that are cross-platform and work with iCloud e.g. SimpleNote, Notion.
    - themadturk 3y ago
      You must not be looking too hard. Runestone and TextTastic are true plain text editors for iOS. I've used them both and they work great.
paulpauper 3y ago
Always make offline backups, including for dropbox too. Storing things in the cloud is never as safe as assumed.
- jb1991 3y ago
  Dropbox is mentioned in the article and it does not behave the way described here for iCloud. I can confirm Dropbox does indeed behave differently, as described in the article.
- dominikmayer 3y ago
  Hi, original author here. The problem is not the lack of a backup. The problem is that the content deletion happens silently. So you won't know that you need to restore from your backup because you don't expect the content of your file to disappear. And over time your correct backups are deleted and the only ones left are those with the missing content.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Is it even possible to locally backup everything to the same fidelity as the Cloud? Apple (for your protection, naturally) seemingly locks you out of much of your own data.
WoodenChair 3y ago
The author suggests using git. But be warned git doesn’t work well with iCloud Drive. I used to have hundreds of git repositories in my iCloud Drive. Periodically, doing a big commit would trigger my whole multi-hundred gigabyte iCloud Drive to resync with Apple’s servers. This would take a day to complete. I went through Apple support up to quite a high level to try to resolve it and they never did. Now I keep my git repositories outside of iCloud Drive. The trigger seems to be if you ever change hundreds of files at the same time in quick succession before the last set of big changes finished syncing.
- dominikmayer 3y ago
  Hi, original author here. Thanks for sharing. My problem is, that I need to use iCloud Drive for some important files because the app I need to use doesn't support another way to sync. Without git I wouldn't have figured out which files have changed. (And even with git, I can't be sure that I caught everything. I guess git content can also be altered by iCloud sync conflicts…)
  - eviks 3y ago
    you might store the git repo on a Dropbox folder (not a good idea in general, afaik clouds aren't reliable enough for git, but as a backup), this way git content can't be corrupted by iCloud? Or maybe even locally if you don't need to commit on other computers, then you'll be certain that git is correct without any cloud intervention
    - dominikmayer 3y ago
      Can I store the hidden git folder outside of the repo content? Not sure how to say. My problem is, that for the time being, some of my files needs to be on iCloud Drive because I rely on one app to edit/create them. Everything else I moved out of iCloud Drive.
      - steve1977 3y ago
        Yes the (in git terminology) repository (.git folder) can be completely separate from the working directory (folder on your iCloud drive)
dpedu 3y ago
The cloud is just someone else's computer.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  What does that have to do with the behavior of conflict resolution?
  - superq 3y ago
    Not your cloud, not your files.
    - eddythompson80 3y ago
      More like “not your merge tool, not your merge preference” I guess?
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      Not your street, not your road, not your right of way. Not your air, not your breath. Not your sunlight, not your tan. Not your water supply, not your legionella’s disease. ‘If you don’t own it, you have no rights’ leads to a dark place.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        Maybe iCloud should be regulated as a utility by the government and held to a higher standard... but it isn't. Plan accordingly.
    - tim333 3y ago
      Though Dropbox doesn't have this issue in spite of similar cloudiness.
softwaredoug 3y ago
I use multiple cloud storage services for redundancy than periodically rsync from cloud storage to a local device for private, local backup using rclone[1] I’m sure there are downsides but I like the benefit of passive image backup and periodic sync. 1 - https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  iCloud is notably missing from rclone, as well as almost all third party sync client. I can’t use iCloud because as far as I know there is no way to sync it on Linux. Even OneDrive has an unofficial client as well as rclone.
sneak 3y ago
A much better reason to not use iCloud Drive is due to the fact that it's not end to end encrypted. Everything you store in it is readable by Apple sysadmins, support reps, and anyone who can compel them (like the US government can, without a warrant now). Don't use non-e2ee services. (Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.) I use syncthing (e2ee, free software) to keep my files on all my machines. It has sane conflict handling and nice versioning backups. It even supports untrusted sync-only devices that never see plaintext so you can run a node on a vps or somewhere offsite safely.
- aroman 3y ago
  surely it’s easier to just click a button and turn on e2ee in icloud than change your entire cloud storage provider…
- aaomidi 3y ago
  If you’re reading this comment, you can also find out that you can turn on e2ee. (Maybe you should lead with that :P) iCloud Drive is like, one of the only providers that has e2ee.
  - dannyphantom 3y ago
    On iOS: Settings > AppleID > iCloud > Advanced Data Protection You'll see 'Add Recovery Contact' and underneath it you'll see 'Recovery Key' 'Off>' Tap into it, agree to the notice, you'll get a 28 alphanumeric key and then re-enter that same key to finish the set-up.
    - photonerd 3y ago
      They really should have it use a pass phrase. Much easier to remember
- fh9302 3y ago
  How is manually turning on iCloud E2EE different to manually searching a provider that supports E2EE by default? This isn't like messaging where the other person also needs E2EE enabled.
layer8 3y ago
As an aside, shouldn’t “(John Doe’s conflicted copy)“ rather be “(John Doe’s conflicting copy)“? I feel conflicted about the former. ;)
alexpotato 3y ago
I had a similar experience: - My wife had cloud sync on her iPhone for Notes - I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for her - She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes?? What did you do?" - I break out in a cold sweat - I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app - I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the Notes - We call Apple - The support person ended up figuring out that we could essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they wouldn't be wiped out. It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more warning/pop ups of the full impact of this. PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in action.
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  Samsung has shipped a similar feature for phones and tvs for many years. Tech suppory can not connect randomly, the customer has to manually approve by entering a key. similar to how teamviewer does it.
- concinds 3y ago
  If you did what I'm thinking of, you could have just turned sync back on and all the notes would have reappeared.
  - laurels-marts 3y ago
    This. Turning sync off shouldn't delete notes from iCloud. It just doesn't sync the notes from iCloud to the specific device in question so they are not visible from that device. To confirm OP could have logged in icloud.com from browser and seen the notes there. Then you can decide on a per-device basis whether you want to sync notes and have them be visible on that specific device.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear in any of the messaging. You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud". And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.
crazygringo 3y ago
Yes a million times. But it's not even just iCloud -- it's something fundamental to so much Apple software. The same thing happens to me repeatedly when I'm highlighting PDF's using Books -- every so often, I go back to a PDF and discover multiple pages of my most recent highlights are missing. It saves highlights as you go along, but sometimes for whatever mystery reason, it decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45. These problems, of Apple silently overwriting newer content with an older version, have been going on for at least a decade at this point. And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed. Because the two hardest problems in software are cache invalidation, naming things, off by one errors, and buffer overflows from a lack of array index enforcement.
  - mrunkel 3y ago
    But what is the fifth problem?
  - navigate8310 3y ago
    Surely a company stuffed with billions of dollars is incapable of solving this either by enabling conflict handling or some ingenious methods.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      All those billions of dollars are focused on making sure you can't replace your screen with an aftermarket part.
    - tim333 3y ago
      Indeed it's not like there aren't better solutions out there as shown by dropbox. Just keep both versions for a month and text you a warning.
kccqzy 3y ago
A long time ago I had a junior developer store the internal storage used by Docker on iCloud Drive. He then suffered multiple weird file version issues inside the containerized app inside Docker before he stopped doing that.
- treyd 3y ago
  I'm curious as to why he would think that's a good idea. It's clearly designed for simple kinds of access patterns with user-edited documents.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    It is storage. Rightly or wrongly, most people are going to think that one storage location is as good as another. I would assume that syncing would get bogged down (re-syncs full blobs rather than incremental bytes) rather than expect any kind of data integrity problem.
    - user_7832 3y ago
      In addition, if they'd use Google Drive I'm 80% sure they wouldn't have had the same issue.
BruceEel 3y ago
Had something similar occurring with my phone when Notes - and only Notes - somehow lost its ability to sync with iCloud (silently, of course.) When it eventually got back in touch with iCloud, five weeks' worth of notes were obliterated from my phone.
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
iCloud lost some of my files as well and I never found out what caused it. I store my tax related documents in a folder per tax year. I only ever change this year's tax folder. The folders for previous tax years are frozen for obvious reasons. And yet when I ran find to look for empty folders some of those old tax folders were empty. I had backups, so the files are not actually gone, but my trust in iCloud Drive is.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  You have added to my to do list. Do I need to worry about this if I have Time Machine backups?
  - ezfe 3y ago
    No, if you have Time Machine backups your fine (also if you don't have optimize storage - Time Machine may not back up files that aren't locally stored, regardless of sync provider)
  - dominikmayer 3y ago
    Hi, original author here. Not sure about the issue when whole files are gone but regarding content being deleted inside the files Time Machine doesn't help. The problem is that you won't know which files have been changed. And Time Machine will gradually phase out old backups, only keeping one per week, month, year or whatever the policy is. So at some point the files with your content will be gone and only backups of the files without your content will be stored.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    Probably not. Time Machine should protect you against the problem I had unless you purge old backups. I don't think Time Machine ever deletes the one and only version it has of a file. But dominikmayer has a very good point there in the sibling comment. I think this would only affect files that change though.
Reptur 3y ago
Speaking of E2EE, does anyone have suggestions on a good alternative?
- gmhafiz 3y ago
  https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net
  - Reptur 3y ago
    Really appreciate it, thank you.
ehPReth 3y ago
Messages store/sync with iCloud is another absolute abomination for me. Endless frustration. Messages on my devices do not properly offload, syncing is broken to the point messages are missing, and stuff like search/attachments just break sometimes. I've waited at least two major OS updates and nothing's improved. You think they'd focus on such a core functionality. Sure, I have 126GB 'in the cloud' apparently, but come on. The only fix I could see was to start fresh: so I set up a fresh Messages app on macOS, left it to sync overnight with the screen on until the "Downloading messages from iCloud banner" went away and made sure the important conversations showed "0 images in iCloud". I then exported what I could via unofficial tools but I still feel like I've lost data, which is painful for me. Such as, searching my earliest known message via another backup showed it in the search results on macOS, but clicking on it showed nothing but a blank conversation. It wasn't even in Messages' SQLite DB after multiple "Sync Now"s and restarts. How the heck did it get that bad? Are the PMs at Apple just that misaligned? I finally tried deleting the most problematic conversation, which went "ok" on the Mac at first, but caused the apps on my iPhone and iPad to do nothing but crash on open. When the Mac synced next, the conversation reappeared with our past messages, but with random gaps in the history (e.g. messages from yesterday, then a week ago, maybe a month before that, etc -- so a incomplete/weirdly ordered deletion). What a bloody mess. I ended up doing a "Disable & Delete" on iCloud Messages. Now I have to wait the the 30 day waiting period for Apple's systems to wipe hopefully wipe the data in that bucket if I feel like trying again. All this certainly does not give me confidence in using iMessage (even with Messages in iCloud turned off) in the future. ------ I'm just.... very very frustrated. How can they take the most precious of their users' data and give no fucks about it? The same thing with "shared photo albums" where it's not (or wasn't) immediately obvious that they re-compress all images and videos to much lower quality because I guess they didn't feel like deciding whose iCloud storage it would take up. So now my friend and I have photos and videos that are irrevocably, unless we go digging and find the originals we hopefully have elsewhere, compressed. And now iCloud Drive as in the article? A team needs to be formed at Apple to have a long hard look at how they're handling their users' data and ensure it's done with the utmost of care. This should be a wakeup call to other companies as well. Users are entrusting you with their live's precious moments, or even their worst of times that may need to or want to be recalled upon later and you should be a good steward of that data. In the case of Apple, at least provide a reliable way to backup or export data such as Messages in iCloud, then perhaps I'd have a bit more than my many wasted hours fighting with your software and hoping that I have everything. "Move fast and break things" really was a terrible mantra.
aj7 3y ago
This is great advice. I was planning to become more iCloud centric after having a hassle with Google Drive no longer mounting on my 2013 10.14 Macbook. (This necessitates a clumsy 2-step process to use Drive on this computer.) Now, I’ll live with this hassle and Drive supports conflicted copies. Dropbox has always worked the best. But I’m through with them thanks to their heavyhanded shakedown of me by reducing free storage from 5GB to 2 in an attempt to get me to pay. Alter cockers don’t pay: we can’t just go on LinkedIn to get a raise.
- pstrateman 3y ago
  I mean 10.14 doesn't receive security updates anymore does it?
endominus 3y ago
I find it difficult to trust Apple as a steward of its customers' data. Speaking second-hand here; my brother is an Apple devotee and a music buff. For many years, he collected recordings of live music shows. They were rare if not entirely transient (in that it would be impossible to reacquire them if lost), and he had a good library of them. Stored on his iMac. Then (as he tells the story) one day iTunes decided to replace all of his rare recordings with the equivalent studio songs. They were gone, and the support personnel he contacted told him they could never be recovered. He still uses Apple computers, but I don't think that wound will ever fully heal.
- gatinsama 3y ago
  "He still uses Apple computers". That's the problem right there. Apple users have an abusive relationship with the brand. They forgive everything.
  - aj7 3y ago
    Not everything. But not going back to Windows.
    - chungy 3y ago
      Install Ubuntu then.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        Ubuntu can’t get the mouse speed right. I’ve bought the best laptops money could get for some employees, System76. The fans are like whistles in the office: Impossible to work with them. There’s nothing that works right with PCs.
      - walteweiss 3y ago
        Why does everyone and their dog recommend Ubuntu, not Fedora? Fedora is so much better!
- 3y ago
dzhiurgis 3y ago
Is there a way to backup icloud (esp photos)? The old saying is - it’s not backed up if it’s in less than two places.
- neoromantique 3y ago
  NextCloud, but the experience is fairly frustrating (gotta open the app manually quite often). Google Photos had better hooks previously, and I can't tell if new iOS limits that shaft NextCloud also affect Google Photos, since I don't use it for a while.
- ezfe 3y ago
  Yeah, if you don't have Optimize Storage enabled then any backup software will be sufficient. If you don't have enough local storage you need to be more mindful.
- gerdemb 3y ago
  I’m developing a Mac app for backing up iCloud Photos here www.ibeni.net
tikkun 3y ago
What’s the best alternative to iCloud Drive for macOS? Dropbox is so heavy and uses system resources, I’d love a lightweight one that I can trust
- bayindirh 3y ago
  New Dropbox is using Apple's file provider and using ~500 MB of RAM. 322 MB for the app itself, and 177MB for the file provider. If you want, there are tons of applications which can talk with Dropbox, with varying levels of capabilities.
  - clnq 3y ago
    Hah, maybe this shows my age, but half a gig of ram for a file syncing service sounds like way too much. I just looked up the new MacBook Airs, and they only have 8 gig of sys memory. The Dropbox share then sounds like it's quite a lot for one service. Why is it so memory-intensive anyways?
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      177MB is acceptable for a file provider I think, but the other ~300 MB is too much for my taste, too. Dropbox is running on a custom Python interpreter with obfuscated/encrypted Python code since forever. This why it needs that much RAM. Yes, it's borderline Electron levels of resource waste, but that thing works, and I can't complain. While Apple can manage that 8GB of RAM relatively well, 16GB RAM is a must on any Mac which is used for serious work.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        > While Apple can manage that 8GB of RAM relatively well, 16GB RAM is a must on any Mac which is used for serious work. I think developers all using higher end hardware than the common base models is a big part of the reason bloat like this exists is a problem in the first place. You've got programmers with 128 GB of ram and 32 CPU cores writing application software for people with 8GB of ram. A few hundred megabytes is nothing to the developer, but substantial to the common user who is also trying to use the same machine for several other things simultaneously.
dominikmayer 3y ago
In case anyone at Apple is reading this: I filed feedback FB11889594 in December 2022.
clnq 3y ago
I too lost quite a few files with iCloud Drive a while ago. I think there might have even been a second file sinkhole, as some of my files disappeared entirely off iCloud Drive circa 2015, without showing up in the deleted/recoverable file list they had if you logged into iCloud over the web. That's not what the author describes.
d3w4s9 3y ago
Last time I checked, there is no file versioning for arbitrary file type on iCloud, meaning that if I made a mistake and modified a file by error, there is no way to get the old file back. I decided that I was not going to put any important document on iCloud but should rely on Dropbox or Google Drive. (It seems that certain apps -- the type that I never use -- support file versioning within the app. That's not useful.)
INTPenis 3y ago
Stop putting your work directly on a network share? Maybe I'm weird but for 20+ years I always used network shares for backups, or sharing of data. Never to store my live work, that's always on my local disk. Why else have a local disk? People put way too much trust in these computers. It feels like we're learning the same lessons over and over again. If you had to put your trust in 1) your local disk, or 2) a cloud service, then local disk always wins. Common sense.
- frenchman99 3y ago
  That's not at all common sense. People that use multiple devices may want to put everything in the cloud service so as to access the same version on all devices.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > People that use multiple devices may want to put everything in the cloud Those people may learn the hard way that deleting documents on one device syncs that deletion to other devices in the same way that making changes to a document on one device syncs the changes to other devices.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    This is what Syncthing is for: everything stays on your local file system, but different local file systems are kept in sync.
    - runjake 3y ago
      Plot twist: I get far more sync conflicts with SyncThing than I do with iCloud Drive. Granted, I’m using SyncThing between 3 different OS platforms.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        Syncthing has pretty basic conflict resolution and depends on the devices being online at the time of the conflict, so that's expected. It does, however, keep everything on the file system, and even allow you to move files to a trash rather than completely deleting them if they're deleted on another device. Hasn't saved my ass yet but maybe one day it will.
chazeon 3y ago
iCloud has become a real nightmare when I try to build something in Swift Playground and open it also on Xcode on a Mac. On iPad I was constantly reminded of conflicts, saying that the file is edited elsewhere, while in fact it was just I leave the Xcode window open. Sometimes it just revert to an older version. It is really annoying.
- threeseed 3y ago
  This has nothing to do with iCloud. It's an issue with Xcode/Swift Playground not supporting concurrent access to a shared project. Any app on any platform that doesn't support this use case will exhibit similar behaviour.
  - andybak 3y ago
    Yeah. But also no. iCloud most definitely adds to the problem.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      You would have exactly the same issue with Google Drive or Dropbox. Changing a shared resource in two apps at the same time will usually cause conflicts unless the app has been specifically designed to support this collaborative style use case.
      - andybak 3y ago
        There's different ways to handle a failure.
deleted 3y ago
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xyst 3y ago
I just avoid using any consumer based cloud storage for dynamically changing docs. Just keep it local, then upload the final result. For code, use git locally. If I want to share, then publish to a remote VCS (gh, gl, personal gitea instance, ..)
- Zetobal 3y ago
  This is the only sensible comment. This whole thread reads like a HN parody.
antonkar 3y ago
And if you keep files in iCloud Drive, your iPhone can remove the local copy any time. So if you want your files to be synced and to be 100% sure you'll have a local copy - you should keep the same file in iCloud Drive and in the "On My iPhone" folder. This is the reason Apple Books, Numbers and all the apps that use iCloud Drive remove local copies all the time. I made a simple note-taking app using iCloud Drive - iCloud was greedily removing a 2 kb txt-file when the app was closed (sometimes it wasn't removing - it's quite random). It doesn't matter if you have a lot of storage space - iCloud still can remove the local version of a file you constantly use. The Apple developer support said nothing can be done. Even for a developer there is no way to mark a file as never to be removed. P.S. In their official docs Apple actually recommends to keep all the user's files in iCloud Drive and _not_ to keep a copy "On My iPhone"
9dev 3y ago
Jep, i am really salty about that too. I used to store my Calibre library in the documents folder (where else would it live, right? Free backup included!). A while ago I discovered several book folders nested in the library that should contain the actual epub files… are empty. The directory structure is there, the database entries are there, but the book files are gone. Not all of them, just about 40%, at random. Moral of the story, don’t store anything in iCloud Drive you like, especially not your books.
- tim333 3y ago
  A naughty tip - you can probably get them back on Libgen.
jadengeller 3y ago
I have dozens of old Pages documents that are inexplicably now “Zero KB”. I would not trust iCloud with your data. (Aside: I really gotta backup my iCloud Photo Library…)
neilv 3y ago
A hint at the underlying problem is calling it "content" instead of data. If you're an aspiring "influencer", producing "content", then go ahead and use bobblehead platforms designed deeply and pervasively to think of the user as a consumer of content, or a captive property of the developer. If you're a hacker or a software engineer, you probably want to be investing in platforms intended for people like yourself. Which, right now, pretty much means Linux or a BSD.
- andybak 3y ago
  I think I'd at least partially agree with your point if I could get past the extremely off-putting way you've chosen to express it.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Agreed, I should've written it better.
  - masfuerte 3y ago
    Eh? Propagandists take care to present their arguments palatably. It's a very poor way to judge truth.
    - andybak 3y ago
      That's not quite what I meant.
nurettin 3y ago
Why not keep the master copy somewhere else and rsync to icloud drive every x minutes?
tomduncalf 3y ago
iCloud Drive is a disaster. I had an old MacBook where all the hard disk space was taken up with phantom stuff by iCloud Drive (it showed as “reserved” or something in Disk Utility) and the only way to get the space back was to create a huge file using `dd if=/dev/zero` which refilled the space with a “real” file… then disable iCloud Drive sharpish. File management on iOS is a mess too. It’s a shame as there’s so much good stuff in the Apple ecosystem but their cloud file storage is not something I want to get involved with any more than I need to!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tamimio 3y ago
Just use obsidian with git addon, sync all your notes with versioning too that you can access your in your remote git repo (or github).
- Etheryte 3y ago
  While Obsidian is neat, that doesn't address the same set of requirements as iCloud Drive. Drive works comfortably with all types of files, not just notes, without embedding files in notes or whatnot.
kossTKR 3y ago
I once set up drive for a family member with two computers effectively nuking their docs slowly without any warning then ended up just "hanging". "Hanging" with no progress bars, no warning, no errors is the Apple way of doing things still after 15 years. I wonder how hard it would be to implement a dev-mode where it actually told you why it hung, or what the hell it's "doing" in magic (black box garbage) mode.
- tim333 3y ago
  There is something a bit like that https://www.howtogeek.com/356942/how-to-view-the-system-log-on-a-mac/ https://www.howtogeek.com/356942/how-to-view-the-system-log-...
brainzap 3y ago
For me iCloud drive does sometimes just not sync, and is stuck on something, you can see the status of sync in the iCloud Drive Finder icon. Closing all apps on mac and iOS, and running "killall bird" (bird is ithe icloud sync service) sometimes fixes it.
ralphc 3y ago
Am I the only person left on the planet that doesn't trust or use iCloud, regularly backing up photos onto my computer then plugging in a hard drive for Time Machine?
- tim333 3y ago
  I do that from time to time. Also Google Photos is good for photos - apart from backing them up the search is good - you can look for given people, locations, objects and so on. Never really liked iCloud.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Here is a terrible flaw in these multi-vendor, heterogeneous networked environments. You can have a filesystem with intuitive semantics, really flexible and great access control, resilient and dependable, fast and efficient, but in order to share this filesystem across the network, with other OSes by different vendors, the lowest common denominator is observed. And so all those features are stripped away, because only the basics are supported when the OS vendors are competing with each other and there are different machines with different filesystem drivers, different file managers, and apps with different libraries and frameworks for accessing files. There is no way to maintain consistency, even with standards-based formats and protocols, when so many disparate vendors and developers are involved. Wait, what's that you say? iCloud is maintained by a single vendor? You are telling me that Apple has control of every iCloud client and server? Hmm, bad bit of luck there.
LAC-Tech 3y ago
Looked into this. Apple chose a sync strategy that will lose users data in certain conditions, so they didn't "bother" users about conflicts too much. They opted not to use much older techniques that would have kept conflicting revisions. My break down is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8k1q6kf1W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8k1q6kf1W0
- tim333 3y ago
  They could also put the duplicates in some conflicts folder without bothering users. That way people could Google "what has Apple done with my files?" and get instructions to get them back. As an aside about not bothering users, iOS silently changed my call settings on some update they pushed on me so the phone wouldn't ring for some callers. Some sort of calming nonsense but I missed a call from my cancer surgeon who I couldn't call back because NHS which freaked me out.
  - LAC-Tech 3y ago
    You're absolutely right - they could just keep the conflicting versions without notifying users in the UI if that was really their concern.
gtvwill 3y ago
Eh no surprises. Apples grossly predatory on many fronts. No surprises they give zero pucks about data integrity for users. Your a cash cow not something their genuinely trying to help.
hackermeows 3y ago
I just lost a lot of music that had saved on apple music after switching to a new phone. There is definitely something wrong with iCloud sync
DavideNL 3y ago
I had the same issue in Numbers. I use the Numbers app daily, 365 days a year; - at some point i saw the sheet (which has a date/time column with the current time, for each row i added) reverting back to a previous version (multiple added rows being deleted / disappearing.) I ended up just removing the file from iCloud and using it locally only. - You also see the same issue in the Shortcuts app, it then at least shows you the 2 conflicting versions with timestamps and asks which one you would like to keep.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
sylvainkalache 3y ago
I’ve got a similar issue with a loss of Contacts. I has been happening for a while but I first thought the issue was me. However on a morning I realized the contact of a friend I was texting with the night before was gone. I realized the problem was iCloud. I reach out to Apple support, and after exhausting all the dummy options, the customer support representative admitted that this was a known issue, but they could not find the root cause. And there was no solution to it. The asked me to monitor my contacts so that I could find when this deletion happen but I would need to give a few minutes range. Because “an iPhone generates a lot of logs and engineers cannot go through them unless we can pinpoint where it exactly happened”. I thought that pinpointed the bug within a 8 hours range was already good, but the customer’s representative insisted on being accurate within minutes (saying the engineers said that). Anyway, as all the hard case that I give to Apple Support, the representative said he would follow-up and call me back but never did. So nothing happened. I move my contacts to Google and just forgot about it.
philip1209 3y ago
I have had a similar experience with Obsidian notes. I would edit the “today” note at different times on my computer and phone, and noticed that I lost content. This seems to happen most when I started a note on my computer, then opened it on my phone. Obsidian has a loading screen that seems to imply that the file system successfully got the latest updates from iCloud, but perhaps it didn’t actually have the latest updates as I started writing. I recently switched my Obsidian notes off of iCloud. I’m using their hosted sync service, and expected to be better – but don’t have enough experience with it yet to be able to recommend it.

345 points by dominikmayer 3y ago

> If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup. I would like to argue this is at least partly the fault of app developers, for adding iCloud support without the conflict handling mechanism. However, why does Xcode, Apple's own in-house app, not support conflict handling?! Apple's own software should be setting the standard for third-party developers. If they don't handle version conflicts, of course no one else will either.

sneak 3y ago
The system APIs should not silently delete important data when the apps haven't implemented the feature. This is an iCloud bug, not an Xcode one.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I'm conflicted. Obviously, deleting data is bad. However, Dropbox's "(John Doe’s conflicted copy)" solution is also pretty awful UX. I can understand why Apple would want to use its uniquely integrated software ecosystem to come up with a better system. I believe they could do it—but they clearly have not.
  - dominikmayer 3y ago
    Agreed. I'm not saying the Dropbox approach is the best. It is better than silently deleting content, though. A different approach would be to add a way to see files that have issues. Similar to how Dropbox shows files that fail to upload.
  - Espressosaurus 3y ago
    It's awful but still better than silently deleting.
  - d3w4s9 3y ago
    Maybe it's awful UX but it's the best you can have and it makes good sense, because there is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for arbitrary file types. You might as well save all the copies and let user figure it out themselves -- user would know much better than Dropbox how to handle the situation.
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      > There is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for arbitrary file types. For Dropbox, I agree. Apple could do it though; that's the advantage of having such great control over your ecosystem.
dominikmayer 3y ago
Hi, original author here. Maybe I wrote it a bit misleading. The thing is: It's independent of the editor. Even if you use an editor that _does_ support conflict handling you can lose the content. Just assume you write something, save, close the editor and never open it again. iCloud might replace the content of that file and there is no way for you to know. The only way to prevent losing your data is setting up a Git repository or open _every important file_ regularly in an editor that supports conflict handling.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  Ah, thank you! I assumed there was some Apple API which is supposed to handle this situation (that's how this really should work IMO), and the apps mentioned had decided to suppress the user message and just pick the newer version or some such.

tpmx 3y ago

My main beef with iCloud: They haven't implemented an iOS or web version of TextEdit, which is what I use for taking notes.

mapmap 3y ago
The Notes app?
- tpmx 3y ago
  Yes, I understand that is what I'm supposed to use, but I like plain text files that can be opened in any app from the 1970s and onwards rather than using some app-specific database. TextEdit.app works great on Mac for this, but there is no equivalent in iOS or in icloud.com.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    There are hundreds of text, markdown etc type apps on the App Store that are cross-platform and work with iCloud e.g. SimpleNote, Notion.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    You must not be looking too hard. Runestone and TextTastic are true plain text editors for iOS. I've used them both and they work great.

paulpauper 3y ago

Always make offline backups, including for dropbox too. Storing things in the cloud is never as safe as assumed.

jb1991 3y ago
Dropbox is mentioned in the article and it does not behave the way described here for iCloud. I can confirm Dropbox does indeed behave differently, as described in the article.
dominikmayer 3y ago
Hi, original author here. The problem is not the lack of a backup. The problem is that the content deletion happens silently. So you won't know that you need to restore from your backup because you don't expect the content of your file to disappear. And over time your correct backups are deleted and the only ones left are those with the missing content.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Is it even possible to locally backup everything to the same fidelity as the Cloud? Apple (for your protection, naturally) seemingly locks you out of much of your own data.

WoodenChair 3y ago

The author suggests using git. But be warned git doesn’t work well with iCloud Drive. I used to have hundreds of git repositories in my iCloud Drive. Periodically, doing a big commit would trigger my whole multi-hundred gigabyte iCloud Drive to resync with Apple’s servers. This would take a day to complete. I went through Apple support up to quite a high level to try to resolve it and they never did. Now I keep my git repositories outside of iCloud Drive. The trigger seems to be if you ever change hundreds of files at the same time in quick succession before the last set of big changes finished syncing.

dominikmayer 3y ago
Hi, original author here. Thanks for sharing. My problem is, that I need to use iCloud Drive for some important files because the app I need to use doesn't support another way to sync. Without git I wouldn't have figured out which files have changed. (And even with git, I can't be sure that I caught everything. I guess git content can also be altered by iCloud sync conflicts…)
- eviks 3y ago
  you might store the git repo on a Dropbox folder (not a good idea in general, afaik clouds aren't reliable enough for git, but as a backup), this way git content can't be corrupted by iCloud? Or maybe even locally if you don't need to commit on other computers, then you'll be certain that git is correct without any cloud intervention
  - dominikmayer 3y ago
    Can I store the hidden git folder outside of the repo content? Not sure how to say. My problem is, that for the time being, some of my files needs to be on iCloud Drive because I rely on one app to edit/create them. Everything else I moved out of iCloud Drive.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      Yes the (in git terminology) repository (.git folder) can be completely separate from the working directory (folder on your iCloud drive)

dpedu 3y ago

The cloud is just someone else's computer.

eddythompson80 3y ago
What does that have to do with the behavior of conflict resolution?
- superq 3y ago
  Not your cloud, not your files.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    More like “not your merge tool, not your merge preference” I guess?
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    Not your street, not your road, not your right of way. Not your air, not your breath. Not your sunlight, not your tan. Not your water supply, not your legionella’s disease. ‘If you don’t own it, you have no rights’ leads to a dark place.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Maybe iCloud should be regulated as a utility by the government and held to a higher standard... but it isn't. Plan accordingly.
  - tim333 3y ago
    Though Dropbox doesn't have this issue in spite of similar cloudiness.

softwaredoug 3y ago

I use multiple cloud storage services for redundancy than periodically rsync from cloud storage to a local device for private, local backup using rclone[1] I’m sure there are downsides but I like the benefit of passive image backup and periodic sync. 1 - https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/

eddythompson80 3y ago
iCloud is notably missing from rclone, as well as almost all third party sync client. I can’t use iCloud because as far as I know there is no way to sync it on Linux. Even OneDrive has an unofficial client as well as rclone.

sneak 3y ago

A much better reason to not use iCloud Drive is due to the fact that it's not end to end encrypted. Everything you store in it is readable by Apple sysadmins, support reps, and anyone who can compel them (like the US government can, without a warrant now). Don't use non-e2ee services. (Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.) I use syncthing (e2ee, free software) to keep my files on all my machines. It has sane conflict handling and nice versioning backups. It even supports untrusted sync-only devices that never see plaintext so you can run a node on a vps or somewhere offsite safely.

aroman 3y ago
surely it’s easier to just click a button and turn on e2ee in icloud than change your entire cloud storage provider…
aaomidi 3y ago
If you’re reading this comment, you can also find out that you can turn on e2ee. (Maybe you should lead with that :P) iCloud Drive is like, one of the only providers that has e2ee.
- dannyphantom 3y ago
  On iOS: Settings > AppleID > iCloud > Advanced Data Protection You'll see 'Add Recovery Contact' and underneath it you'll see 'Recovery Key' 'Off>' Tap into it, agree to the notice, you'll get a 28 alphanumeric key and then re-enter that same key to finish the set-up.
  - photonerd 3y ago
    They really should have it use a pass phrase. Much easier to remember
fh9302 3y ago
How is manually turning on iCloud E2EE different to manually searching a provider that supports E2EE by default? This isn't like messaging where the other person also needs E2EE enabled.

layer8 3y ago

As an aside, shouldn’t “(John Doe’s conflicted copy)“ rather be “(John Doe’s conflicting copy)“? I feel conflicted about the former. ;)

alexpotato 3y ago

I had a similar experience: - My wife had cloud sync on her iPhone for Notes - I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for her - She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes?? What did you do?" - I break out in a cold sweat - I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app - I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the Notes - We call Apple - The support person ended up figuring out that we could essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they wouldn't be wiped out. It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more warning/pop ups of the full impact of this. PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in action.

taskforcegemini 3y ago
Samsung has shipped a similar feature for phones and tvs for many years. Tech suppory can not connect randomly, the customer has to manually approve by entering a key. similar to how teamviewer does it.
concinds 3y ago
If you did what I'm thinking of, you could have just turned sync back on and all the notes would have reappeared.
- laurels-marts 3y ago
  This. Turning sync off shouldn't delete notes from iCloud. It just doesn't sync the notes from iCloud to the specific device in question so they are not visible from that device. To confirm OP could have logged in icloud.com from browser and seen the notes there. Then you can decide on a per-device basis whether you want to sync notes and have them be visible on that specific device.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear in any of the messaging. You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud". And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.

crazygringo 3y ago

Yes a million times. But it's not even just iCloud -- it's something fundamental to so much Apple software. The same thing happens to me repeatedly when I'm highlighting PDF's using Books -- every so often, I go back to a PDF and discover multiple pages of my most recent highlights are missing. It saves highlights as you go along, but sometimes for whatever mystery reason, it decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45. These problems, of Apple silently overwriting newer content with an older version, have been going on for at least a decade at this point. And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.

ben_w 3y ago
> And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed. Because the two hardest problems in software are cache invalidation, naming things, off by one errors, and buffer overflows from a lack of array index enforcement.
- mrunkel 3y ago
  But what is the fifth problem?
- navigate8310 3y ago
  Surely a company stuffed with billions of dollars is incapable of solving this either by enabling conflict handling or some ingenious methods.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    All those billions of dollars are focused on making sure you can't replace your screen with an aftermarket part.
  - tim333 3y ago
    Indeed it's not like there aren't better solutions out there as shown by dropbox. Just keep both versions for a month and text you a warning.

kccqzy 3y ago

A long time ago I had a junior developer store the internal storage used by Docker on iCloud Drive. He then suffered multiple weird file version issues inside the containerized app inside Docker before he stopped doing that.

treyd 3y ago
I'm curious as to why he would think that's a good idea. It's clearly designed for simple kinds of access patterns with user-edited documents.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fbdab103 3y ago
  It is storage. Rightly or wrongly, most people are going to think that one storage location is as good as another. I would assume that syncing would get bogged down (re-syncs full blobs rather than incremental bytes) rather than expect any kind of data integrity problem.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    In addition, if they'd use Google Drive I'm 80% sure they wouldn't have had the same issue.

BruceEel 3y ago

Had something similar occurring with my phone when Notes - and only Notes - somehow lost its ability to sync with iCloud (silently, of course.) When it eventually got back in touch with iCloud, five weeks' worth of notes were obliterated from my phone.

fauigerzigerk 3y ago

iCloud lost some of my files as well and I never found out what caused it. I store my tax related documents in a folder per tax year. I only ever change this year's tax folder. The folders for previous tax years are frozen for obvious reasons. And yet when I ran find to look for empty folders some of those old tax folders were empty. I had backups, so the files are not actually gone, but my trust in iCloud Drive is.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
You have added to my to do list. Do I need to worry about this if I have Time Machine backups?
- ezfe 3y ago
  No, if you have Time Machine backups your fine (also if you don't have optimize storage - Time Machine may not back up files that aren't locally stored, regardless of sync provider)
- dominikmayer 3y ago
  Hi, original author here. Not sure about the issue when whole files are gone but regarding content being deleted inside the files Time Machine doesn't help. The problem is that you won't know which files have been changed. And Time Machine will gradually phase out old backups, only keeping one per week, month, year or whatever the policy is. So at some point the files with your content will be gone and only backups of the files without your content will be stored.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  Probably not. Time Machine should protect you against the problem I had unless you purge old backups. I don't think Time Machine ever deletes the one and only version it has of a file. But dominikmayer has a very good point there in the sibling comment. I think this would only affect files that change though.

Reptur 3y ago

Speaking of E2EE, does anyone have suggestions on a good alternative?

gmhafiz 3y ago
https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net
- Reptur 3y ago
  Really appreciate it, thank you.

ehPReth 3y ago

Messages store/sync with iCloud is another absolute abomination for me. Endless frustration. Messages on my devices do not properly offload, syncing is broken to the point messages are missing, and stuff like search/attachments just break sometimes. I've waited at least two major OS updates and nothing's improved. You think they'd focus on such a core functionality. Sure, I have 126GB 'in the cloud' apparently, but come on. The only fix I could see was to start fresh: so I set up a fresh Messages app on macOS, left it to sync overnight with the screen on until the "Downloading messages from iCloud banner" went away and made sure the important conversations showed "0 images in iCloud". I then exported what I could via unofficial tools but I still feel like I've lost data, which is painful for me. Such as, searching my earliest known message via another backup showed it in the search results on macOS, but clicking on it showed nothing but a blank conversation. It wasn't even in Messages' SQLite DB after multiple "Sync Now"s and restarts. How the heck did it get that bad? Are the PMs at Apple just that misaligned? I finally tried deleting the most problematic conversation, which went "ok" on the Mac at first, but caused the apps on my iPhone and iPad to do nothing but crash on open. When the Mac synced next, the conversation reappeared with our past messages, but with random gaps in the history (e.g. messages from yesterday, then a week ago, maybe a month before that, etc -- so a incomplete/weirdly ordered deletion). What a bloody mess. I ended up doing a "Disable & Delete" on iCloud Messages. Now I have to wait the the 30 day waiting period for Apple's systems to wipe hopefully wipe the data in that bucket if I feel like trying again. All this certainly does not give me confidence in using iMessage (even with Messages in iCloud turned off) in the future. ------ I'm just.... very very frustrated. How can they take the most precious of their users' data and give no fucks about it? The same thing with "shared photo albums" where it's not (or wasn't) immediately obvious that they re-compress all images and videos to much lower quality because I guess they didn't feel like deciding whose iCloud storage it would take up. So now my friend and I have photos and videos that are irrevocably, unless we go digging and find the originals we hopefully have elsewhere, compressed. And now iCloud Drive as in the article? A team needs to be formed at Apple to have a long hard look at how they're handling their users' data and ensure it's done with the utmost of care. This should be a wakeup call to other companies as well. Users are entrusting you with their live's precious moments, or even their worst of times that may need to or want to be recalled upon later and you should be a good steward of that data. In the case of Apple, at least provide a reliable way to backup or export data such as Messages in iCloud, then perhaps I'd have a bit more than my many wasted hours fighting with your software and hoping that I have everything. "Move fast and break things" really was a terrible mantra.

aj7 3y ago

This is great advice. I was planning to become more iCloud centric after having a hassle with Google Drive no longer mounting on my 2013 10.14 Macbook. (This necessitates a clumsy 2-step process to use Drive on this computer.) Now, I’ll live with this hassle and Drive supports conflicted copies. Dropbox has always worked the best. But I’m through with them thanks to their heavyhanded shakedown of me by reducing free storage from 5GB to 2 in an attempt to get me to pay. Alter cockers don’t pay: we can’t just go on LinkedIn to get a raise.

pstrateman 3y ago
I mean 10.14 doesn't receive security updates anymore does it?

endominus 3y ago

I find it difficult to trust Apple as a steward of its customers' data. Speaking second-hand here; my brother is an Apple devotee and a music buff. For many years, he collected recordings of live music shows. They were rare if not entirely transient (in that it would be impossible to reacquire them if lost), and he had a good library of them. Stored on his iMac. Then (as he tells the story) one day iTunes decided to replace all of his rare recordings with the equivalent studio songs. They were gone, and the support personnel he contacted told him they could never be recovered. He still uses Apple computers, but I don't think that wound will ever fully heal.

gatinsama 3y ago
"He still uses Apple computers". That's the problem right there. Apple users have an abusive relationship with the brand. They forgive everything.
- aj7 3y ago
  Not everything. But not going back to Windows.
  - chungy 3y ago
    Install Ubuntu then.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      Ubuntu can’t get the mouse speed right. I’ve bought the best laptops money could get for some employees, System76. The fans are like whistles in the office: Impossible to work with them. There’s nothing that works right with PCs.
    - walteweiss 3y ago
      Why does everyone and their dog recommend Ubuntu, not Fedora? Fedora is so much better!
3y ago

dzhiurgis 3y ago

Is there a way to backup icloud (esp photos)? The old saying is - it’s not backed up if it’s in less than two places.

neoromantique 3y ago
NextCloud, but the experience is fairly frustrating (gotta open the app manually quite often). Google Photos had better hooks previously, and I can't tell if new iOS limits that shaft NextCloud also affect Google Photos, since I don't use it for a while.
ezfe 3y ago
Yeah, if you don't have Optimize Storage enabled then any backup software will be sufficient. If you don't have enough local storage you need to be more mindful.
gerdemb 3y ago
I’m developing a Mac app for backing up iCloud Photos here www.ibeni.net

tikkun 3y ago

What’s the best alternative to iCloud Drive for macOS? Dropbox is so heavy and uses system resources, I’d love a lightweight one that I can trust

bayindirh 3y ago
New Dropbox is using Apple's file provider and using ~500 MB of RAM. 322 MB for the app itself, and 177MB for the file provider. If you want, there are tons of applications which can talk with Dropbox, with varying levels of capabilities.
- clnq 3y ago
  Hah, maybe this shows my age, but half a gig of ram for a file syncing service sounds like way too much. I just looked up the new MacBook Airs, and they only have 8 gig of sys memory. The Dropbox share then sounds like it's quite a lot for one service. Why is it so memory-intensive anyways?
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    177MB is acceptable for a file provider I think, but the other ~300 MB is too much for my taste, too. Dropbox is running on a custom Python interpreter with obfuscated/encrypted Python code since forever. This why it needs that much RAM. Yes, it's borderline Electron levels of resource waste, but that thing works, and I can't complain. While Apple can manage that 8GB of RAM relatively well, 16GB RAM is a must on any Mac which is used for serious work.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      > While Apple can manage that 8GB of RAM relatively well, 16GB RAM is a must on any Mac which is used for serious work. I think developers all using higher end hardware than the common base models is a big part of the reason bloat like this exists is a problem in the first place. You've got programmers with 128 GB of ram and 32 CPU cores writing application software for people with 8GB of ram. A few hundred megabytes is nothing to the developer, but substantial to the common user who is also trying to use the same machine for several other things simultaneously.

dominikmayer 3y ago

In case anyone at Apple is reading this: I filed feedback FB11889594 in December 2022.

clnq 3y ago

I too lost quite a few files with iCloud Drive a while ago. I think there might have even been a second file sinkhole, as some of my files disappeared entirely off iCloud Drive circa 2015, without showing up in the deleted/recoverable file list they had if you logged into iCloud over the web. That's not what the author describes.

d3w4s9 3y ago

Last time I checked, there is no file versioning for arbitrary file type on iCloud, meaning that if I made a mistake and modified a file by error, there is no way to get the old file back. I decided that I was not going to put any important document on iCloud but should rely on Dropbox or Google Drive. (It seems that certain apps -- the type that I never use -- support file versioning within the app. That's not useful.)

INTPenis 3y ago

Stop putting your work directly on a network share? Maybe I'm weird but for 20+ years I always used network shares for backups, or sharing of data. Never to store my live work, that's always on my local disk. Why else have a local disk? People put way too much trust in these computers. It feels like we're learning the same lessons over and over again. If you had to put your trust in 1) your local disk, or 2) a cloud service, then local disk always wins. Common sense.

frenchman99 3y ago
That's not at all common sense. People that use multiple devices may want to put everything in the cloud service so as to access the same version on all devices.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > People that use multiple devices may want to put everything in the cloud Those people may learn the hard way that deleting documents on one device syncs that deletion to other devices in the same way that making changes to a document on one device syncs the changes to other devices.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  This is what Syncthing is for: everything stays on your local file system, but different local file systems are kept in sync.
  - runjake 3y ago
    Plot twist: I get far more sync conflicts with SyncThing than I do with iCloud Drive. Granted, I’m using SyncThing between 3 different OS platforms.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      Syncthing has pretty basic conflict resolution and depends on the devices being online at the time of the conflict, so that's expected. It does, however, keep everything on the file system, and even allow you to move files to a trash rather than completely deleting them if they're deleted on another device. Hasn't saved my ass yet but maybe one day it will.

chazeon 3y ago

iCloud has become a real nightmare when I try to build something in Swift Playground and open it also on Xcode on a Mac. On iPad I was constantly reminded of conflicts, saying that the file is edited elsewhere, while in fact it was just I leave the Xcode window open. Sometimes it just revert to an older version. It is really annoying.

threeseed 3y ago
This has nothing to do with iCloud. It's an issue with Xcode/Swift Playground not supporting concurrent access to a shared project. Any app on any platform that doesn't support this use case will exhibit similar behaviour.
- andybak 3y ago
  Yeah. But also no. iCloud most definitely adds to the problem.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    You would have exactly the same issue with Google Drive or Dropbox. Changing a shared resource in two apps at the same time will usually cause conflicts unless the app has been specifically designed to support this collaborative style use case.
    - andybak 3y ago
      There's different ways to handle a failure.

deleted 3y ago

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xyst 3y ago

I just avoid using any consumer based cloud storage for dynamically changing docs. Just keep it local, then upload the final result. For code, use git locally. If I want to share, then publish to a remote VCS (gh, gl, personal gitea instance, ..)

Zetobal 3y ago
This is the only sensible comment. This whole thread reads like a HN parody.

antonkar 3y ago

And if you keep files in iCloud Drive, your iPhone can remove the local copy any time. So if you want your files to be synced and to be 100% sure you'll have a local copy - you should keep the same file in iCloud Drive and in the "On My iPhone" folder. This is the reason Apple Books, Numbers and all the apps that use iCloud Drive remove local copies all the time. I made a simple note-taking app using iCloud Drive - iCloud was greedily removing a 2 kb txt-file when the app was closed (sometimes it wasn't removing - it's quite random). It doesn't matter if you have a lot of storage space - iCloud still can remove the local version of a file you constantly use. The Apple developer support said nothing can be done. Even for a developer there is no way to mark a file as never to be removed. P.S. In their official docs Apple actually recommends to keep all the user's files in iCloud Drive and _not_ to keep a copy "On My iPhone"

9dev 3y ago

Jep, i am really salty about that too. I used to store my Calibre library in the documents folder (where else would it live, right? Free backup included!). A while ago I discovered several book folders nested in the library that should contain the actual epub files… are empty. The directory structure is there, the database entries are there, but the book files are gone. Not all of them, just about 40%, at random. Moral of the story, don’t store anything in iCloud Drive you like, especially not your books.

tim333 3y ago
A naughty tip - you can probably get them back on Libgen.

jadengeller 3y ago

I have dozens of old Pages documents that are inexplicably now “Zero KB”. I would not trust iCloud with your data. (Aside: I really gotta backup my iCloud Photo Library…)

neilv 3y ago

A hint at the underlying problem is calling it "content" instead of data. If you're an aspiring "influencer", producing "content", then go ahead and use bobblehead platforms designed deeply and pervasively to think of the user as a consumer of content, or a captive property of the developer. If you're a hacker or a software engineer, you probably want to be investing in platforms intended for people like yourself. Which, right now, pretty much means Linux or a BSD.

andybak 3y ago
I think I'd at least partially agree with your point if I could get past the extremely off-putting way you've chosen to express it.
- neilv 3y ago
  Agreed, I should've written it better.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  Eh? Propagandists take care to present their arguments palatably. It's a very poor way to judge truth.
  - andybak 3y ago
    That's not quite what I meant.

nurettin 3y ago

Why not keep the master copy somewhere else and rsync to icloud drive every x minutes?

tomduncalf 3y ago

iCloud Drive is a disaster. I had an old MacBook where all the hard disk space was taken up with phantom stuff by iCloud Drive (it showed as “reserved” or something in Disk Utility) and the only way to get the space back was to create a huge file using `dd if=/dev/zero` which refilled the space with a “real” file… then disable iCloud Drive sharpish. File management on iOS is a mess too. It’s a shame as there’s so much good stuff in the Apple ecosystem but their cloud file storage is not something I want to get involved with any more than I need to!

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tamimio 3y ago

Just use obsidian with git addon, sync all your notes with versioning too that you can access your in your remote git repo (or github).

Etheryte 3y ago
While Obsidian is neat, that doesn't address the same set of requirements as iCloud Drive. Drive works comfortably with all types of files, not just notes, without embedding files in notes or whatnot.

kossTKR 3y ago

I once set up drive for a family member with two computers effectively nuking their docs slowly without any warning then ended up just "hanging". "Hanging" with no progress bars, no warning, no errors is the Apple way of doing things still after 15 years. I wonder how hard it would be to implement a dev-mode where it actually told you why it hung, or what the hell it's "doing" in magic (black box garbage) mode.

tim333 3y ago
There is something a bit like that https://www.howtogeek.com/356942/how-to-view-the-system-log-on-a-mac/ https://www.howtogeek.com/356942/how-to-view-the-system-log-...

brainzap 3y ago

For me iCloud drive does sometimes just not sync, and is stuck on something, you can see the status of sync in the iCloud Drive Finder icon. Closing all apps on mac and iOS, and running "killall bird" (bird is ithe icloud sync service) sometimes fixes it.

ralphc 3y ago

Am I the only person left on the planet that doesn't trust or use iCloud, regularly backing up photos onto my computer then plugging in a hard drive for Time Machine?

tim333 3y ago
I do that from time to time. Also Google Photos is good for photos - apart from backing them up the search is good - you can look for given people, locations, objects and so on. Never really liked iCloud.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Here is a terrible flaw in these multi-vendor, heterogeneous networked environments. You can have a filesystem with intuitive semantics, really flexible and great access control, resilient and dependable, fast and efficient, but in order to share this filesystem across the network, with other OSes by different vendors, the lowest common denominator is observed. And so all those features are stripped away, because only the basics are supported when the OS vendors are competing with each other and there are different machines with different filesystem drivers, different file managers, and apps with different libraries and frameworks for accessing files. There is no way to maintain consistency, even with standards-based formats and protocols, when so many disparate vendors and developers are involved. Wait, what's that you say? iCloud is maintained by a single vendor? You are telling me that Apple has control of every iCloud client and server? Hmm, bad bit of luck there.

LAC-Tech 3y ago

Looked into this. Apple chose a sync strategy that will lose users data in certain conditions, so they didn't "bother" users about conflicts too much. They opted not to use much older techniques that would have kept conflicting revisions. My break down is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8k1q6kf1W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8k1q6kf1W0

tim333 3y ago
They could also put the duplicates in some conflicts folder without bothering users. That way people could Google "what has Apple done with my files?" and get instructions to get them back. As an aside about not bothering users, iOS silently changed my call settings on some update they pushed on me so the phone wouldn't ring for some callers. Some sort of calming nonsense but I missed a call from my cancer surgeon who I couldn't call back because NHS which freaked me out.
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  You're absolutely right - they could just keep the conflicting versions without notifying users in the UI if that was really their concern.

gtvwill 3y ago

Eh no surprises. Apples grossly predatory on many fronts. No surprises they give zero pucks about data integrity for users. Your a cash cow not something their genuinely trying to help.

hackermeows 3y ago

I just lost a lot of music that had saved on apple music after switching to a new phone. There is definitely something wrong with iCloud sync

DavideNL 3y ago

I had the same issue in Numbers. I use the Numbers app daily, 365 days a year; - at some point i saw the sheet (which has a date/time column with the current time, for each row i added) reverting back to a previous version (multiple added rows being deleted / disappearing.) I ended up just removing the file from iCloud and using it locally only. - You also see the same issue in the Shortcuts app, it then at least shows you the 2 conflicting versions with timestamps and asks which one you would like to keep.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

sylvainkalache 3y ago

I’ve got a similar issue with a loss of Contacts. I has been happening for a while but I first thought the issue was me. However on a morning I realized the contact of a friend I was texting with the night before was gone. I realized the problem was iCloud. I reach out to Apple support, and after exhausting all the dummy options, the customer support representative admitted that this was a known issue, but they could not find the root cause. And there was no solution to it. The asked me to monitor my contacts so that I could find when this deletion happen but I would need to give a few minutes range. Because “an iPhone generates a lot of logs and engineers cannot go through them unless we can pinpoint where it exactly happened”. I thought that pinpointed the bug within a 8 hours range was already good, but the customer’s representative insisted on being accurate within minutes (saying the engineers said that). Anyway, as all the hard case that I give to Apple Support, the representative said he would follow-up and call me back but never did. So nothing happened. I move my contacts to Google and just forgot about it.

philip1209 3y ago

I have had a similar experience with Obsidian notes. I would edit the “today” note at different times on my computer and phone, and noticed that I lost content. This seems to happen most when I started a note on my computer, then opened it on my phone. Obsidian has a loading screen that seems to imply that the file system successfully got the latest updates from iCloud, but perhaps it didn’t actually have the latest updates as I started writing. I recently switched my Obsidian notes off of iCloud. I’m using their hosted sync service, and expected to be better – but don’t have enough experience with it yet to be able to recommend it.