Hacker News Reader

Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

As per the article, this isn't specific to iCloud:

> This could be more innocent than it sounds. Computer data is never actually “deleted” until it’s overwritten with new 1s and 0s — operating systems simply cut off references to it. One user also said they saw a photo return even though they don’t sync their phone or use iCloud, implying the photos could be originating from on-device storage.

View on HN

On the Reddit threads, there are also users reporting photos returning after being deleted from a different Apple device of a different type— Even when the original device did not have ICloud enabled.

It's very odd. For it to be a local storage issue, it seems like IOS would have to be copying entire disk images across devices and accidentally doing file carving on freed resources. So I think ICloud is the most plausible technical explanation currently. At the same time, a cloud storage issue implies either malice or incompetence at a level that we currently only have indirect evidence of.

Except, the computer needs to know where to point to to read the data. So why are they keeping the index/inode around? Unless they're doing some unrequested data recovery to find these files?

Yup, exactly. If it's removed from the index it won't just show up again one day. This tells me that that innocuous explanation is not what's going on here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com