Bitten by the black box of iCloud | Hacker News Reader

Bitten by the black box of iCloud

sixcolors.com

72 pointsvoisin38 comments

I got skiddish about my data integrity when I tried updating the email address associated with my icloud; my notes stopped syncing from my iphone to my macbook etc so I decided I would export everything for a backup lest a "sync" operation decide to wipe my data from the blank device to the one with data.

I was frustrated for hours trying to find the export option in notes (there are some half-measures) but in the end I was pleased with the file format they give you when you download data from this page, equivelant to google Takeout:

https://privacy.apple.com/account

It does take a few days from the request to the zip download, but I got my 100GB of apple photos and 5,000 apple notes complete with pdf and url attachments

Thank you for sharing this link. I had no idea it existed but it is exactly what I needed for backing up my photos en masse.

On a side note, this is the second time I’ve seen skittish spelt that way on HN comments in a week or so, having never seen it before. Is this some regional variation or just spreading organically from a mistake?

I would assume it's very similar to bone apple tea. Hearing the word before you've read it, so spreading organically from a mistake. https://old.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/

lol I mean I've never seen it written down I guess so that's how I spelled it off the top of my head. midwest fwiw.

Skittish makes me thinks of skittles

They spelled it how they pronounce it.

> As someone who spends a lot of time working with technology and did his stint in tech support, I have a certain natural recalcitrance to turning to the company itself for help. I presumed that I would be made to run through a litany of time-wasting tests to establish what I had already concluded. But without much in the way of recourse, I resolved to give it a shot and fired up a chat session.

And here is why I love apple. I can either spend all the time attempting to investigate and fix the solution in a way the author did, or I can simply pick up the phone and let Apple do it for me.

I can't imagine the pain had this been Google.

Sounds like a great, Apple-like experience. The person got great customer service. The problem was resolved relatively quickly. But the process was opaque.

not to nitpick, but waiting 12 hours for resolution isn't "relatively quick".

> “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.”

...and this part is why I don't love Apple. Don't get me wrong; calling a number is the lowest-friction fix for most people. But if I can't know why things broke, I can't feel comfortable doing things 'like normal' again. The lack of transparency when things go wrong is the worst part of dealing with companies like Google, for me.

Except that they didn’t solve the issue. “Please wait 12 hours” is not a solution to “I can’t access my email”.

Also, nothing in the story suggests that calling customer support in any way expedited returning access.

> And here is why I love apple. I can either spend all the time attempting to investigate and fix the solution in a way the author did, or I can simply pick up the phone and let Apple do it for me.

This may probably work out to be a waste of time. When iMessage stopped working for me and I couldn’t even activate it for my phone number (just out of the blue), I contacted Apple support. They followed up with me over a few months, installing a profile to collect more logs, asking me to perform some steps, send logs, videos of what I was seeing when I tried activating it, many other steps, etc. The case was then transferred to another person because the one handling it was “not available”. Then after some days, it was just crickets. No responses on chats or emails on that case. They just dropped it as if I’d never contacted them at all.

I’m not saying this is how it’ll play out for everyone in every situation. But what’s clear to me is that even Apple’s engineering team — the one that received all the logs and knows things at the code level — has limits on its understanding of the software and devices as well as what it’s willing to do to solve problems.

Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.

What you would do is the reverse. Store all your documents on the NAS, which could be mounted on multiple clients. Then backup the NAS to the cloud.

Yes. Local to Cloud, not Cloud to Local.

As for Photos, I'd do a weekly or monthly export if I did not have the space to store the library locally (I do).

And if you want to use that NAS while you are outside of your house, you could run Tailscale on both client and server, and that would allow you to securely connect to your NAS remotely over the WireGuard encrypted Tailscale connection.

Elcomsoft's Phone Breaker will let you download your entire iCloud as a local archive. Not free or even cheap, but it does work:

https://www.elcomsoft.com/eppb.html

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Absolutely 100% illegal in the EU to force acceptance of third party cookies.

Even though Elcomsoft have a long and storied history, why should people trust their data to the software of a company which already shows such disdain for privacy?

Time Machine backs up files in iCloud Drive. (which is what Desktop/Documents is)

But only the downloaded ones I assume, not evicted files?

Pretty sure Macs download everything, but I don't know what happens if there isn't disk space for that.

OP stated he doesn't have enough disk space for everything on one computer. So it would at least be a bit of hassle (i.e. having the backup spread across multiple Time Machine backups.

Have a look at SuperDuper![0] (The exclamation mark is part of the software name, as there are some other things with the same name, but the spelling above is correct.)

It’s shareware, and there’s a free trial. It’s fairly priced imo, and I’ve only used the shareware version. The paid version has some decent QoL features including ACL fixup, but I’m not sure how important that is? I usually run Disk Utility to try to fix those myself but I don’t claim to know the specifics of the paid features.

It seems to work fine with NAS volumes that are configured to play nice with Time Machine, but I forget what the specifics entail on that part. The .dmg backup should be more compatible with varied NAS setups; iirc it has something to do with ACLs being writable by macOS and associated software.

I like that it can make bootable clones of disks to other disks. It can also make .dmg backups of folders or disks.

No affiliation, just a happy user. If anyone knows of other software in the space, I’d love to hear about them, especially FOSS options.

[0] https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...

The paid version of SuperDuper! can do incremental backups whereas the free version will always do a full backup and take more time. I’d say it’s worth it to pay for it since you get updates for at least a few years for that version. I use the paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com) though.

Thanks for the reply. I don’t know CCC well enough to comment on it other than to say that I hear good things from its users.

What do you like about CCC? I haven’t ever used it, though I have used a few different commercial/paid backup software and services, running on various OSes. I don’t consider myself a backup expert as far as how the software is implemented or anything, but I have experience testing backups produced by various backup softwares in test and production environments for clients and in-house. I’ve also configured and used a few different FOSS and also proprietary NAS softwares/OSes and how they interact with backup sets.

I think I personally prefer backups that are a single or multiple file archives vs cloning files, and that’s why I don’t really consider iCloud a backup at all. Also I have encountered issues where the target filesystem doesn’t support ACLs or file/folder permissions in a compatible way compared to the origin filesystem/OS, leading to… fun times in rabbit holes.

The best advice I could give anyone when it comes to backups is testing the restore functionality; just because a tool tells you that a backup is valid doesn’t necessarily mean it will restore properly, or at all, with the software that produced it or even specialized tools.

I run this as a container in my nas (unraid).

https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd

It’s been great for backing up for backing up photos and videos. Haven’t tried any other files though.

Here we have an entire blog post where a self-proclaimed tech-savvy user is completely unable to perform any amount of valuable work because they have no access to any data that they supposedly own.

Here is a professional in the world of tech, calling customer support to try and understand what happened to data they created but cannot access. Because they don't have a copy. Because they let Apple talk them into vendor locking themselves. And now they literally can't work, and are surprised by this fact, and have no idea why. And you're completely at peace with the fact that Apple has it stored on a non-redundant server somewhere you have no idea where, and are totally comfortable with the fact that they might grant or deny your access to that data at their discretion and you have no recourse.

I love how we have "professionals" who can't use bare metal or be bothered to administer systems, applications, or data. You don't deserve to be in this field if you can't do this stuff yourself. Someday you will lose something that doesn't belong to you, and it's going to ruin someone else's day.

This isn't very charitable. There's a saying about the shoes of the cobbler after all. The profession is large enough that we can have experts on, e.g., compiler optimizations, who do not care to know or bother with the tedious work of administering systems, applications, or data that have always and they hoped always would "just work."

Maybe that's overly optimistic or naive, but they need not be excommunicated from the field. There are a great many things in this field that I don't know that I arguably should. I learn them when I need to.

Nobody knows everything in this field and anybody telling you otherwise is full of it!

Recent and related:

iCloud Drive silently deletes your content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37626273 - Sept 2023 (248 comments)

That's a lot of words to say "I knew what iCloud was 10 years ago, continued to use it, and I continue to reap what I have sown."

Cloud = other people's computers. I don't trust them. Especially when they are a free service.

I prefer to backup all my work to portable hard drives. Yes, more than one, in case one goes bad, another can take it's place.

I backup to a local drive using Time Machine and I use "normal" copy to backup to another local drive. Time Machine is more convenient when it works, which it usually does, but I have the regular backup in case it doesn't.

I recently decided to increase my storage and share with my family and was disappointed to find that the “free” 5GB of storage disappears. For a family of 6, that’s 30GB of previously free storage that now counts against a paid quota.

I don’t have any experience with iCloudDriveFuse, but if it works well it might be a nice way to do offline backups.

The “free” plan is 5gb. Apple does not grant you a perpetual license for 5gb, you buy a plan with more space. Why would you assume that a 100GB plan gives you 105GB?

Do not rely on iCloud Drive. It is absolutely terrible and unreliable on anything except MacOS and iOS.

I found it surprising going from a full 50GB single user plan to a 200GB family plan that 75GB were already consumed. I’m not saying it’s wrong, just surprising in a disappointing way.

I had a customer complain that they had to pay an hourly charge for a managed service we provide even when they’re not using it (they can shut it down if they so desire). It’s been a challenging couple weeks. :)

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