Tell HN: iBooks has deleted all my downloaded books | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: iBooks has deleted all my downloaded books

55 pointsrayalez38 comments

So apparently when your iPad is getting low on space, it just deletes all the books from your iBooks library. Without asking for permission or notifying you in any way. It "offloads" them to the iCloud, so you have to re-download them manually.

Which is a very unpleasant thing to find out after you went on a summer vacation to the area without the internet, hoping to plug off, having downloaded a bunch of books you were hoping to read.

This is the most infuriating moment of using a piece of technology I've ever had.

I'm posting this here on the off chance that someone from Apple reads this, since that happens with threads on HN sometimes.

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Slightly misleading title. My personal anecdote:

We’re about to board a long haul flight and our son was too eager to download Netflix kids programs so that space ran out. Apple has a default policy of offloading unused apps to conserve space. Unfortunately it offloaded the Netflix app itself :-/

I really struggled with the iCloud feature that automatically uploads stuff to save space. I was running low on disk space and iCloud just constantly auto-uploaded files and deleted them locally. While this – in theory – might sound like a good idead, there where three issues that turned this into an nightmare:

- I could not tell iCloud which files i needed locally, or configure it in any way

- iCloud constantly uploaded files that I recently used and needed

- Sometimes it took very long to get them back

E.g. I would have a python script with a venv and because some files would not be there locally, the excecution failed. And even though I had internet access, I could keep clicking on the cloud-icon to fetch the file, and nothing happend... It was nightmarish. No I'm trying to quit iCloud, but I first have to understand how to get all my files back and what will get deleted when I quit. Not too easy...

Yeah for me iCloud pretty much will fill itself up almost immediately if I let it.

Solution....I just turn it off...

The problem with auto cloud backup is that short of just taking photos.... even somewhat casual users will fill their quota infinitely.

are you saying with or without paying the $1/m?

Misleading title. It’s not an unrecoverable delete. It’s moved into iCloud as you had specified.

You can even turn off iBooks from using iCloud in Settings.

If they do not have access to the Internet on their iPad while on their remote vacation, it is an unrecoverable delete, at least temporarily.

Your second suggestion seems like it is blaming the user. How does the user know this is the action Apple will take upon low disk space? Isn't the sane thing that downloads are left alone, whether or not cloud backup is turned on?

> it is an unrecoverable delete, at least temporarily.

That’s not really a precise phrase. It’s recoverable, but with a delayed outage (denial of service).

Sorry to hear that! If only there was a way to download media that you could then save/duplicate across many devices without needing to pay rent every-time you want to acquire it.

Hopefully some industrious programmer eventually figures that out, it would be really useful. The genesis of such a library would be so useful. Too bad it would be really hard to keep the pirates at bay!

Did you read the issue?

Device was low on memory. Books where saved on iCloud. The devices offloaded the books to make space.

How does downloading them through other means help?

Exquisitely phrased, some will understand.

It's funny that Apple thinks deleting books can be a good way to recover memory. Books are usually all under 1MB in my experience. Tablets now have a minimum of 256GB and most of them also accept SD cards of similar capacities. No need to delete 1MB books!

Both iPad Pro models, $800 and $1,000 respectively, start at 128GB. And iPads do not accept SD cards.

Yeah they should really do something about that

The iPad Pro was 64Gb until this year. And that’s the “pro”.

My iPad Pro from 2016 has 128 gb.

I’m curious what people here think would be the better solution here and why?

1. Delete the books anyway but notify 2. Don’t delete the books/apps, notify user that memory is running out

Definitely the second of those options. Inform the user, educate, talk, get consent, before any action "on behalf of the user". But then again some people like such decision being made for them. Still would be an ethically better way to inform before action.

Ask the user what they want to move?

3. Notify the user and ask what the user wants to be moved to iCloud to free up space on the device.

I think one can choose per app wether to use icloud sync and backup (but not within the app which individual files to keep on the phone). For Files one can also explicitly tell to save them locally (but then they are not duplicated in iCloud.

Give an option to pick and choose what they don't mind moving into the cloud, and which ones they definitely always want on the machine and not be asked again about.

The reason I hate using Apple and Windows stuff is that the system seems to think it knows better than you. This is a philosophical thing, not a technology thing.

The SYSTEM decides what's offloaded to the iCloud. The SYSTEM decides that you can't start up your Windows machine to print that report that's due in 10 minutes, because it just absolutely must spend 40 minutes completing its updates before it will let you do anything with the computer.

How hard is it to have a list of things to be offloaded, downloaded, updated, or whatever? Then the USER gets to select what happens with what, rather than the SYSTEM deciding, and often wrongly.

In this case it is a setting and you can turn it off.

I’ve seen this happen frequently in both iBooks and Apple Music, which is why I refuse to use either. I always assumed it was a DRM thing? Kindle doesn’t do this at all, and while Spotify does, it’s much rarer, and always waits until you have connectivity, so it can immediately re-download.

It’s such an obvious deal-breaker, I don’t understand how “let’s delete your stuff all the time, even in offline mode” made it through testing.

I've had something similar happen with Spotify. Sometimes it (used to?) invalidates downloaded content, probably to refresh the DRM.

I was at the airport for an intercontinental flight and wanted to quickly download another album, so I disabled Spotify's offline mode. At that point it started re-downloading everything over airport Wifi. Needless to say I was not amused.

There’s other things Apple’s doing that are even worse imo. I didn’t realize until yesterday that if you receive a phone call on your iPhone (on the number) that if you’ve used your Apple ID on an iPad (used by family members) it also receives the call and can be answered via FaceTime, I kind of considered that a massive invasion of privacy but after searching around online seems no ones bothered by it. I have now turned that “feature” off. I had already been careful to turn off syncing that takes place all over the place too on these devices. iCloud and the like shouldn’t be turned on by default and I had no idea about the call option, it didn’t occur to me a phone call to my phone number could be received by someone else using a shared iPad. The problem is someone has to sign into these shared devices that family/kids sometimes use in order to download apps. It should really be limited to the store though. Now I’ve tried signing in just for the purpose of purchasing and we’ll see if that works, I think the iCloud/call features are off now.

Not only that, but if your primary texting device is not Apple, but you use FaceTime even once, FaceTime will eat any text messages sent to you from Apple users, and they won't reach your main texting device. It happened to me, and that's how I know.

I've learned to stay away from Apple ecosystem altogether, because it rarely brings anything good to my life in the long term.

This is not correct; you are conflating FaceTime and iMessage.

If you insert your SIM in an iPhone or iPad, then yes your number will be registered for iMessage and all iOS users will default to iMessaging you.

You cannot FaceTime to or from your phone number without your SIM being inserted in the device. In the absence of this, you can FaceTime just fine using your Apple ID as the identifier.

I promise you, this exact thing happened to me.

I had never used my number with an Apple device, I only registered my email and FaceTimed someone.

Maybe I gave Apple my phone number at some point.

One day, I looked at my Apple device after not using it for a while, and discovered a handful of text messages which had been forwarded there -- you're right, to iMessage, not FaceTime -- on the Apple device.

I never received them on my actual number.

Everything I know (and my expertise on this topic is pretty good) indicates that a phone number cannot be registered for iMessage without a SIM carrying that number being inserted into an iPhone or iPad.

Other devices signed into the same iCloud account can then use that number as well.

How is that a privacy issue?

You logged in with your personal Apple ID and stayed logged in.

Just use the family option for getting apps on kids/family members devices.

You have to stay logged in for the App Store, or you need to login each time. The point is I only want to be logged in for one purpose (the store), I don’t need all devices I’m logged into be syncing and taking my calls. I understand now this behavior can be changed but I had no idea this was even a feature. My stance is that this should not be the default setting the same as the thread creator doesn’t appreciate books offloading to iCloud by default to be a helpful feature. It’s the default option of these types of things that can inadvertently lead to privacy issues or issues where data you expected to be there when you need it not being there.

>You have to stay logged in for the App Store, or you need to login each time.

You can log into app store with a separate account and it will remember it.

If your family uses your iPad, you can create a new Apple ID and then use the "Family Sharing" feature to get access to apps bought with your main account.

This is what my wife and I do, and will do for our kids when they're old enough to have a device like that. One purchase, shared by the household. Much simpler than manually logging in or having your credentials used by others.

Very much by design and it’s an excellent feature. I want to be able to text from my iPhone and iPad without having to fiddle with apps and settings and other nonsense. It works right out of the box. Everyone I know is the same way; you are going against the grain here.

Even with enough space on my iPhone iBooks keeps deleting books. Every time I open the app I have to redownload all my books.

This happened to me too and it sucked, especially if you run out/don't use icloud storage. :(

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