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On Christmas Day, iCloud drive's 2TB plan decided to roll back some of my important files to a version from mid October. I know this because I am meticulous ab
by foobiekr 3y ago
On Christmas Day, iCloud drive's 2TB plan decided to roll back some of my important files to a version from mid October.
I know this because I am meticulous about backups and these particular files are encrypted private records. I don't trust software but I especially don't trust that backups will correctly handle sparse disk images since they are spread out over hundreds of files; so I always keep the output of mtree in that directory for the current version. I had checked the mtree file, edited some of the files contained therein, and regenerated it the night before; SOME but not all of the sparseimage subfiles had rolled back to October. Changed timestamps, changed hashes, the image did mount but the enclosed files were from October (they have date-stamped rows).
So when I went to open the disk image, the next day, and ran mtree to test the directory first, it noted the changes above.
I moved to icloud drive about two years ago. I'd previously had some problems with Apple's sync blowing away some notes in notes.app so when I moved everything from Dropbox (where my paid account for 7 years never lost or corrupted a file to my knowledge - and my knowledge is good because this mtree habit I just described goes back a decade!) to iCloud, I kept this habit up, and good thing.
To this day I don't know how it decided October or ended up replacing them. Maybe there was some local cache, I don't know. I did not revert the file in iCloud and nobody else has access to my account. Further, it only partially rolled the image back.
I had never had a problem up to that point, but I will say, with storage, once is too many times. Back to dropbox.
- bombcar 3y agoThe ATP podcast was mentioning someone who had a similar issue. Apples cloud is drippy.
- foobiekr 3y agoYeah. Weird paranoid habits massively saved me. I no longer trust icloud drive at all. My backup discipline is excellent because back in the early 2000s we lost a drive which I had not been backing up and it had months of contract work on it; I ended up paying $2500 plus $30 per _CDROM_ burned for the content from that drive... it was just barely worth it.
- bombcar 3y agoThe backup philosophy I have is that each “thing” is a single point of failure. In other words, iCloud is one “thing” even if it claims itself to have multiple versions/copies/backups. But the scary thing about this is that it might have gone undetected- silently reverting a file and it not being noticed is death-tier horrifying.
- kccqzy 3y agoApple has lost my data in iCloud Photo Library as well as in Contacts Sync. I don't trust that for anything important.
- znpy 3y agoIf you use iCloud for backup you’re not meticulous about backup.
- foobiekr 3y agoIf you would reread you would see that it’s for online files, not backups, you know, what iCloud is for, but feel free to ignore the actual content to pretend be smart.