Tell HN: iBooks has deleted all my downloaded books

55 points by rayalez 5 years ago | 38 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.

gingerlime 5 years ago |

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 :-/

niklasd 5 years ago |

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...

duxup 5 years ago | |

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.

basch 5 years ago | | |

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

nell 5 years ago |

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.

bmitc 5 years ago | |

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?

stepstop 5 years ago | | |

> 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).

arthurcolle 5 years ago |

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!

rovr138 5 years ago | |

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?

tilt_error 5 years ago | |

Exquisitely phrased, some will understand.

perryizgr8 5 years ago |

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!

bmitc 5 years ago | |

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

Havoc 5 years ago | | |

Yeah they should really do something about that

benhurmarcel 5 years ago | |

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

vimy 5 years ago | | |

My iPad Pro from 2016 has 128 gb.

SenHeng 5 years ago |

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

RandomBacon 5 years ago | |

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

occamrazor 5 years ago | | |

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.

sriram_malhar 5 years ago | |

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.

zelphirkalt 5 years ago | |

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.

jimnotgym 5 years ago | |

Ask the user what they want to move?

simonblack 5 years ago |

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.

idoh 5 years ago | |

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

plake 5 years ago |

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.

andor 5 years ago |

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.

ajeet_dhaliwal 5 years ago |

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.

vimy 5 years ago |

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

rootsudo 5 years ago |

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