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Tempus Fugit

Mark Jaquith's personal blog

How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

Apple’s iCloud Drive sounds great.

[…] with iCloud Drive, you can safely store all your presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and any other kind of document in iCloud. Then access them from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC […]

— Apple.com

That’s pretty cool! All your files on all your devices. And I like the part about “safely”. After all, if you’re trusting Apple with all your precious photos and personal documents and work files, you’d better hope Apple won’t just lose them on you. That would be terrible. That would be heartbreaking.

But that is exactly what Apple’s iCloud Drive does.

iCloud Drive deletes your files. Without warning. Without any recourse*. Your files: gone forever*.

Let’s take a common scenario: getting a new Mac. If all your documents are stored in iCloud, this is easy! Just sign in to iCloud on your new Mac, and boom, there are all your files. Right? Well, so it appears. But of course, your new Mac can’t download these files instantly. So what look like local copies of your iCloud Drive files are actually just dummy files. “.icloud” files, to be exact. These files masquerade as the real thing, but they are just placeholders.

So, let’s say you have a folder full of these placeholders. Large Keynote presentations, Photoshop files, and personal photos. And let’s say that, on your shiny new Mac, you want to move these files from iCloud Drive to your local hard drive, or to another synced drive like Google Drive or Dropbox. Well, you can just drag their folders do the other destination, right? You sure can. Apple kindly warns you that your dragging action is moving that folder, and that the files will be moved to your Mac, and won’t exist on iCloud Drive anymore. Fine. That’s what dragging a file from one place to another generally does!

Screen Shot 2015-06-02 at 12.32.33 PM

But what happens if there are files inside this folder that haven’t yet synced to your local machine? Well, the move operation will be slower, because your Mac has to first download them from iCloud Drive. But once they download, they’ll be in their new location. Right?

Nope. Those files are now gone. Forever*.

In their place, is a file named FILENAME.original-extension.icloud. This file, only a couple kilobytes in size, is the placeholder that OS X uses to pretend that the file existed on your system. Your original file is gone. It’s gone from iCloud Drive, and it exists nowhere on your hard drive.

But OS X will just see those .icloud files and use them to download the originals from iCloud’s servers, right?

Nope. Those files are now gone. Forever*.

But you can just go into the web UI and roll back a folder to an earlier version, right? Nope. Unlike Dropbox, and many of its competitors, Apple does not keep old copies of files.

But surely there was some “loading indicator” or something to indicate that this data wasn’t ready for manipulation, right? Nope. There is no indicator that a folder contains non-synced files. There are indicators in individual files, but not on folders that contain non-synced files. And even if they did, that is not a sufficient warning that an unknown selection of unloaded files will be deleted if that folder is moved.

Cloud storage is a brilliant idea, but the way Apple has implemented it is reckless and irresponsible. People’s data is sacred, and Apple makes it really easy to just vaporize it, forever.

*Update: Dan Moren mentions that the “Recover Documents” screen on iCloud.com can be used to recover deleted files, so “forever” might not be forever. All I can say is that I became aware of this issue when it happened to a friend, and Apple Support was not able to recover her documents. I don’t know what was different in this case. Maybe the sheer number of files involved. I’m currently trying to replicate this issue with a larger data set (lots of medium-to-large files) to see if there is some limit on document recovery.

 

Update 2: October 20th, 2015 — Apple informs me that they believe this bug to have been fixed in the OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” release!

The 2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro

My history with portable Macs has been all over the place. I started in 2005 with a 15 inch PowerBook G4. In 2007 I upgraded to the ridiculously large 17 inch MacBook Pro. It weighed 6.8 pounds. Yeah. In 2010, in an effort to atone for my sins against gravity, I “downgraded” to a 13 inch “unibody” MacBook Pro (only 4.5 pounds!). In 2012, I got a 13 inch MacBook Air (3 pounds). But way before that, in 2009, I got a Mac Pro tower. A dual quad-core beast of a machine. And I upgraded the heck out of it. I upgraded the video card, upgraded to dual SSDs in RAID-0, upgraded to a PCI-e internally-RAID-0 SSD card, added a Blu-ray drive, bought a 30-inch screen in addition to the 24 I had. I went nuts on this thing. But at six years old, it’s starting to feel its age. It destroys at multithreaded tasks like video encoding, with 16 v-cores. But for single threaded stuff, the GHz weren’t measuring up. The MacBook Air wasn’t really improvement in that regard… it was just massively mobile.

So, last month I decided to upgrade my portable, to a 2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

Wow.

I’ve enjoyed several of my previous Mac portables, but none so intensely as this.

The form factor

I’ve gone up half a pound from the MacBook Air I was using. And I’ve gained some fractions of an inch in thickness. These haven’t mattered at all. I actually found the knife-sharp front-edge of the MacBook Air to be annoying. Reclining on a couch, it would stab into my stomach, leaving a lovely red line below my belly button. The MacBook Pro has a thicker front edge that feels more comfortable in any position.

The extra weight is only really noticed when I’m carrying the machine around by a corner. In a backpack or a bag, I notice no difference. I wouldn’t call either machine “light” — not in the iPad sense — but neither is either heavy.

The build quality on the MacBook Pro is better than the Air. First, the screen is glass instead of plastic, and the bezel is flush with the screen, whereas it is recessed on the MacBook Air. The recessed screen not the MacBook Air was massively annoying to me, as it collected lots of dust and dirt and lint. The MacBook Pro is easy to keep clean.

Battery life

The battery life is unreal. Apple quotes it as 10 hours. I’ve gotten that. I’ve also gotten more (on a long flight, with Wi-Fi off). I take it places and don’t even consider bringing a power cord. Even if I know I’m going to be using it all day, for serious work. I want Apple to look at the compromises they made for this machine (more weight and more thickness for more battery) and apply them to the iPhone. Let us arrest the tyranny of “thinner, lighter” and actually get devices that last a day.

Performance

The SSD on this beast is incredible. It reads and writes at 1.2GB per second. The processor (I went for the 2.7GHz i5, not even the fastest) is quite speedy. I went with the standard 8GB instead of 16GB. It’s plenty, even with running VMs.

Trackpad

This was the first Mac to get the new “Force Touch” trackpad. First know that the previous mechanical MacBook trackpad was probably the best trackpad in the industry. Second, know that the “Force Touch” trackpad absolutely blows the previous one out of the water. The “haptic” click sensation is uncanny. You cannot convince yourself that the pad isn’t clicking. In the Apple store, they showed me two machines, next to each other. One was off, the other on. The off one’s trackpad was a rigid object. The other seemed to bend and delightfully click at my touch. But of course each was moving the same amount (which is to say, almost not at all).

The ability to click anywhere on the trackpad is game-changing. No more lifting your finger and reaching down, or relying on your thumb to rest in a “click-friendly” zone. Glide your finger, and click where ever you end up.

Screen

Lastly, the screen on the 13 inch MacBook Pro is phenomenal. Bright, colorful, and super high resolution. You can choose between resolutions. Normally, I choose the 1280×800-equivalent Retina resolution, with perfect pixel doubling. Sometimes, if I need more room for something, I’ll jump into a 1680×1050 mode. Using the fullscreen capabilities most OS X apps now have, I rarely feel cramped.

Conclusion

This is my favorite Mac yet. I find myself taking it everywhere, and I’ve been a lot more productive on it. Don’t be fooled by the outward appearance that seems the same as machines 3 or 4 years old. This is a beast, and it is an absolute delight to use. Highly recommended.

Christopher Blizzard: intellectual honesty and HTML5

Christopher Blizzard nails what is wrong with Apple’s “HTML5” demos which use browser sniffing and Safari- and Webkit-specific tech to exclude other browsers with good HTML5 support.

The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.

via Christopher Blizzard · intellectual honesty and html5.

Indeed. While the new stuff that HTML5 enables is exciting, the most amazing part is that the spec attempts to describe how a parser should implement these features in enough detail that two different browser vendors can follow the spec and end up with a parser that works the same (for the most part) as one created by another team who also followed the spec.

The cynical iPad?

Cory Doctorow wrote a scathing critique of the iPad. Well, not so much a critique of the iPad as a critique of the future of sealed-box, sealed-ecosystem computing that it portends. We should have seen this coming with the iPhone, but somehow we didn’t grasp the impact of making the screen roughly six times bigger. It all seems obvious in retrospect.

Much of what Cory says resonates with me. But I disagree with his conclusions. My reaction to the iPad went in stages: meh, horror, acceptance.

Meh

The iPad announcement was underwhelming. It suffered from vastly inflated expectations, and so much of the device is derivative of the iPhone. It looked like 2007’s state of the art, except that it wouldn’t fit in your pocket.

Horror

Then I “got it.” This is something that people will use in lieu of a computer, and eventually in stead. I spent a solid day in a state of horror. I grew up with computers that you could open, and fix, and build yourself, and write programs for that would run instantly and you could send to your friends and they could run them instantly. I did all of those things. That freedom to tinker helped me discover a lot about myself, and now I’m a Lead Developer on an Open Source web publishing platform used by tens of millions of people to publish content that is viewed by billions of people. The iPad seems like an attack on the cornerstone of my career and my very constitution.

Acceptance

Not everyone needs a computer they can service, and upgrade, and program. Full stop. This was my first breakthrough. My second was this:

There will always be computers for tinkerers.

Cory calls the iPad infantalized, and talks about its “contempt for the user.” That’s one way of looking at it. I suspect that most people without a programming background or who are not expert computer users will just call it “easy” and “intuitive.” We had a nice couple of decades where we thought that the future was a powerful $3,000 expandable, upgradable multi-function machine on everyone’s desk. We were wrong. People don’t want something that is capable of doing anything. They want something that does what they want to do, does it well, does it reliably, at a low price, and makes them feel clever. General purpose computing devices failed them. We were never going to live in a world where everyone is an expert user of traditional general purpose computers.

That may be cynical, but it’s true. This is the part where you start crying and I hug you and tell you that everything is going to be okay. Queue piano crescendos to mark the emotional turning point. But seriously, it’s going to be okay.

The kids are still tinkering, and if I know anything about tinkerers, it is that they find a way to change their world, no matter what hurdles you put in front of them.

You can also take courage in the fact that the main barriers against fusing the user’s paradise that Apple offers and the tinkerer’s paradise about which we wax nostalgic are legal in nature. Software patents and the DMCA are the real enemy. Apple is only playing the game according to the rules of the board. Bring down those travesties, and Cory may avoid having to pay for an expensive and painful Apple tattoo removal.

Apple to bring changes to retail stores

Finally, Apple is going to ditch their Windows CE-based point-of-sale devices and replace them with specialized iPod Touch devices for use in their flagship stores.

Next, the handheld checkout devices will be swapped out for specially-equipped iPod touches. A new scanner accessory will interact with point-of-sale software on the iPods.

When iPhone OS 3.0 came out with support for external peripherals, I asked my local Apple Store contact when they’d be migrating to iPod Touches. “I hope fucking soon, man,” he responded, as the Symbol device froze yet again and he had to re-enter all my information with a stylus.

MSN Mobile Music service: a blast from the past

msn hearts drm

This interview of Microsoft UK’s Head of Mobile simply boggles the mind. Microsoft’s new MSN Mobile Music service allows people to buy and download music directly to their mobile phone.

It costs £1.50 per song (about $2.08 US as of this writing).

You cannot transfer songs to your computer.

You cannot transfer the songs when you buy a new mobile phone.

Compare to something like Amazon’s MP3 store, which sells songs for about $0.79 US, has no restrictions on transferring them to and from mobile devices. It defies reason that Microsoft’s offering ever saw daylight. Honestly, go read the interview. It’s short. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a parody! Both Amazon and Apple have abandoned DRM (use restrictions) for their music offerings, and have driven down their prices, while expanding their selection. Microsoft’s offering is more than twice as expensive, and is tied to a single physical device.

Reconsidering my computer strategy

For the last four years, my computer strategy has been to have a single high-performance notebook machine. First an Apple PowerBook G4, and currently, an Apple MacBook Pro. I’m reconsidering that strategy for two reasons:

Portability

My 17-inch MacBook isn’t the most portable machine. Even though it is one of the lightest and smallest 17-inch machines on the market, it still weighs 6.8 lbs and is 10.4 by 15.4 inches. I’ve been traveling more, and the weight and size of the machine have been restrictive.

Power and expandability

While my machine (even as last year’s model) is quite fast as far as portables go, it’s nowhere near as fast (or as future-proof and expandable) as a Mac Pro tower.

While traveling, I never need all the power of my MacBook Pro. On the road, I’m mostly doing e-mail, web browsing, presentations, and light web/WordPress development. The stuff that I do that requires a more powerful machine (photo processing, massive multitasking with multiple monitors) is done at my desk at home. And when at home, I work from home, in my office — not at Starbucks or Panera or anything like that.

The plan

So for 2009 (read: Q2-Q4), I think I’m going to trade in the 17-inch MacBook Pro for a 13-inch MacBook (or maybe MacBook Air), and get a Mac Pro tower for use as my main machine.  While the MacBook/Mac Pro combo would run about $1,500 more than a MacBook Pro by itself (considering that I already have a monitor), it’d likely be less expensive over the longer term, because upgrading the Mac Pro would be less expensive than getting a new MacBook Pro every two years, and I could likely use the relatively inexpensive MacBook as my “road” machine for 4 or 5 years (performance not being such a big factor on the road). Plus, I’d have a much more powerful primary machine for home use, with the ability to upgrade things like memory and storage incrementally.

What do you think? Have I missed anything? Has anyone else made a similar transition?

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