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Comment by ysleepy | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a decision based on Apples image. They can only lose when enabling data checksums.

The user would have to be informed, since Apples hardware has no storage redundancy. That will be perceived as an admission of failure on Apples part; your $2k device just murdered your data.

There is not really a UX flow apart from telling the user to recover the file from backup.

Technically it is the dominant strategy to have data checksums. - Even if you assume the Hardware is very awesomely perfect.

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>There is not really a UX flow apart from telling the user to recover the file from backup.

I agree with all your points, but just want to offer a possible UX solution:

Since the vast majority of data on people's hard drives are video and images, where minor data corruption results in (in most cases) just visual artifacts, we could have a pop-up dialogue that says: "A higher quality version of this file is found on your backup. Do you want to restore it?" when the corrupted file is a video or image and there's a confirmed backup of it.

If there's no confirmed backup then just silently ignore the corruption since the user won't notice anyways.

That is little different from a flat-out lie.

> There is not really a UX flow apart from telling the user to recover the file from backup.

There absolutely is, since that could be performed automatically. Inform the user about the corruption, rename the corrupted file, then restore the most recent backup in its place.

That's assuming that there's backup and OS knows about it. Huge majority of people don't have any backups or their backups are not automatic, so OS can't restore the file.

To the extent that this is true in the modern era of cloud services, it's irresponsibly abetted by so many programs silently ignoring errors rather than reporting them.

In Apple's case, they have complete control over iCloud and could offer this easily for any file which is stored there. They could also add some sort of metadata API so services like CrashPlan, Backblaze, etc. could register the presence of other copies in a generic manner. Third party services could also integrate background scrubs into their existing application.

In each case, the first time that dialog appeared you'd likely have a customer for life from anyone who's gone through the hassle of losing a personal memory, important document, etc. or make a panicked search for other/older copies.

If there isn't a backup, it should at least notify the user of the error. But the OS would know about backups, since it has a built-in backup system.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple adds a cloud-based backup for macOS once APFS is the default filesystem, since change sets would be extremely efficient.

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