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.
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).
iTunes also used to randomly delete music on updates. And they deliberately deleted non-iTunes Store music at one point (which AFAICT was a separate thing).
> The moral is don't use Apple cloud services for anything you care about.
The moral is don't trust ANYONE for anything you care about [1]. Especially free services - the free service you use can go under or away in a matter of days. Example: google code.
I'm not saying don't use "cloud" services - but always think about what will happen if someone attempts to delete the wrong LUN on some random SAN.
Happened to me. Besides being an unbelievably irresponsible bug, the core functionality is terrible. I had an important document in my iCloud Drive and needed to send it urgently via email. This isn't possible on an iDevice. There is no file browser, you just have to open the file in the appropriate host app. And if that file type isn't one that can be opened by an iApp you are iFucked.
I don't know why I haven't heard it called iFucked before but that is brilliant. Please create an entry in Urban Dictionary for that.
The same with G Drive btw, it keeps wanting to send an f'ing G Drive link. It is such a denial of reality, this pretence that email attachments don't exist.
>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!"
Dropbox's event log has saved me so many times. I have recovered pictures of my family that mean a great deal to me. I even get an email if lots of files were deleted, and the API is amazing. That's why I love Dropbox, the file sync is their bread and butter, their core business and not just a feature.
Just wonder how long they will manage ? Their competition is fierce and cloud storage is indeed an additional feature of their competitor products.
A bit like standalone digital camera losing out to smartphones despite obvious quality difference. In this case, dropbox does not even have an obvious quality benefit: syncing is a bit of a lemon market and in any case it works perfectly for most people the majority of the time.
I'm both an iCloud and a Dropbox customer. The fact that I chose to pay for iCloud despite paying for Dropbox is my anecdotal evidence of the perceived value of iCloud "other services" (which I admit is Apple ecosystem prison - just sweet enough a prison you don't want to break free). I trust Dropbox - but I know that eventually, if iCloud does not betray me for a while I will be tempted to save some money on it.
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.
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.
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.
iCloud is a disaster. I can't even remember the things it does to address books, calendars and notes. I am trying to block the memory of having to explain to my MD wife why almost her entire calendar, address book and notes EVAPORATED when she decided she did not want her phone to connect to iCloud. In this case 100% of her data had been entered through the phone. However, iCloud somehow decided anything that lived on iCloud and had been updated in any way from any machine had to be deleted iCloud AND the phone once she turned off iCloud.
I think iCloud is quite revealing of Apple's incompetence as well as the contempt they have for the very users they claim to love. The fact that they think this is OK and normal is, in my opinion, quite disturbing. The same applies to changes made to OSX over the last few years. Incomprehensible, arrogant and full of contempt for users.
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.
I think it is safe to say that Apple iCloud is not a backup product, but merely a file synchronisation tool.
I never liked the idea of stub files with tools like this. I used Livedrive a few years ago and the whole stub files gives a false sense of security. The only benefit it provided was I could double click the stub file and prioritise the download.
But I don't think the user was using it as a backup, it was using it as a storage product. As in, I'm working on a file across multiple devices, so I'm going to store it in iCloud Drive so everything is kept up to date.
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 myself.
Software having bugs is understandable and people live with it. But there are a few areas where such fuckups are just unacceptable. Deleting files, photos, security stuff etc fall in that category. And as more and more stuff move to the cloud, companies better understand the priority of this.
Agree, this is an awful long article for a bug report. Sure, it's a bad bug, but it's still a bug. Treating Apple like they wronged us morally isn't exactly the most effective path to a timely solution.
I've never used iCloud drive, and now I'm very happy that it's the case. It seems like a very incompetent bug, once they implemented the .iCloud files they should have seen this.
One of the main reasons to stick with Dropbox at this point is they have the UX figured out. Everyone else even with better specs/features is still playing catch up to that.
Google Drive does something very similar. Never use their Windows drive client unless you want gross permanent and/or silent partial deletion. The iOS and android clients seem more robust, but neither can handle syncing >1000 files without crashing, or handle large files like videos efficiently (iOS version at least can't do partial uploads or continue uploads). The single upload queue also prevents user-requested immediate sync. Basically, it's horrible.
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.
> Fine. That’s what dragging a file from one place to another generally does!
To me this is not fine. Usually dragging from a different device(USB Thumbdrive <-> hard drive, SD Card <-> Thumbdrive, ....) should copy the files, and the cloud should be considered as another device.
Could a Mac user confirm if this is the default behavior on Mac devices?
[+] [-] jmount|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbauman|10 years ago|reply
http://praxtime.com/2013/11/03/apple-strat-tax-voice-as-god-...
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] endtime|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackaflocka|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nadams|10 years ago|reply
The moral is don't trust ANYONE for anything you care about [1]. Especially free services - the free service you use can go under or away in a matter of days. Example: google code.
I'm not saying don't use "cloud" services - but always think about what will happen if someone attempts to delete the wrong LUN on some random SAN.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-lost-data-2011-4
[+] [-] reilly3000|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glhaynes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry_octet|10 years ago|reply
The same with G Drive btw, it keeps wanting to send an f'ing G Drive link. It is such a denial of reality, this pretence that email attachments don't exist.
[+] [-] eclipxe|10 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] markjaquith|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _mikz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lemevi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gutnor|10 years ago|reply
A bit like standalone digital camera losing out to smartphones despite obvious quality difference. In this case, dropbox does not even have an obvious quality benefit: syncing is a bit of a lemon market and in any case it works perfectly for most people the majority of the time.
I'm both an iCloud and a Dropbox customer. The fact that I chose to pay for iCloud despite paying for Dropbox is my anecdotal evidence of the perceived value of iCloud "other services" (which I admit is Apple ecosystem prison - just sweet enough a prison you don't want to break free). I trust Dropbox - but I know that eventually, if iCloud does not betray me for a while I will be tempted to save some money on it.
[+] [-] markdown|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jostmey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|10 years ago|reply
And it's a goddamm disaster if that's the case.
[+] [-] markjaquith|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] verytrivial|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image . It uses 8MB chunks by default which sync quite quickly.
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rebootthesystem|10 years ago|reply
I think iCloud is quite revealing of Apple's incompetence as well as the contempt they have for the very users they claim to love. The fact that they think this is OK and normal is, in my opinion, quite disturbing. The same applies to changes made to OSX over the last few years. Incomprehensible, arrogant and full of contempt for users.
[+] [-] _mikz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
That said, they're both brain-dead UIs, yes.
[+] [-] tedunangst|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin-adams|10 years ago|reply
I never liked the idea of stub files with tools like this. I used Livedrive a few years ago and the whole stub files gives a false sense of security. The only benefit it provided was I could double click the stub file and prioritise the download.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|10 years ago|reply
Theoretically.
[+] [-] larrymcp|10 years ago|reply
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 myself.
[+] [-] gcr|10 years ago|reply
I'd love to see a blog post describing your test protocol, if you have time to write one.
[+] [-] padmanabhan01|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lorento|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morganvachon|10 years ago|reply
Also, it's reminiscent of the Steam on Linux bug (though not as catastrophic); it's well within the realm of possibility.
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benguild|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry_octet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entropie|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vmarsy|10 years ago|reply
To me this is not fine. Usually dragging from a different device(USB Thumbdrive <-> hard drive, SD Card <-> Thumbdrive, ....) should copy the files, and the cloud should be considered as another device.
Could a Mac user confirm if this is the default behavior on Mac devices?
[+] [-] _mikz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phelm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelCrawford|10 years ago|reply
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/essays/jump-the-shark.html
[+] [-] MichaelCrawford|10 years ago|reply
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