Well that was an unnecessarily hostile response, especially since you appear to have misunderstood or misread what I wrote. I did not say that the files were u

Well that was an unnecessarily hostile response, especially since you appear to have misunderstood or misread what I wrote. I did not say that the files were unlinked at the filesystem level and somehow recovered as is. I said that they likely were doing a similar user space soft delete where the files themselves were note actually deleted. In fact, my second sentence is: > Instead they are marked as deleted and just left un-displayed / un-indexed until they’re finally overwritten by some need to use that space. I referenced both the unlinking that a program like `rm` would do, and the wear leveling tech in SSDs both as examples of how we already have similar concepts of soft deletes at other layers of the stack. My suggestion was that Apple has added an additional layer on top of this, which does soft deletes at the file presentation layer. That explains both how the files could move with backups (and without "block by block backup") and how they can just be "relinked and just appear out of thin air". I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough in distinguishing what I was suggesting Apple was doing, and the analogies I was using as a comparison point. Perhaps in the future, you could assume good intent and ask for clarification if I haven't been clear enough for you, rather than accusing me of being stupid or a shill.