Mobile devices/OSes are for consuming and messaging or accessing remote systems as a glorified ultra-portable dumb terminal. They're not designed for creating or handling/storing important data.
Who else deletes your files with no ability to roll back? OneDrive allows it[0]. DropBox allows it[1]. Amazon allows it[2]. Google Drive kinda allows it[3].
The rest of your post is built on that faulty assumption ("everyone is just as bad"). I've proven that that is untrue, therefore your whole "but mobile!!!" justification is wrong.
[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Delete-or-restore-f...
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/296
[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
Whether that only works with intentionally deleted files or it would help with the ones in this post that were deleted because of system error, I'm not sure.
http://praxtime.com/2013/11/03/apple-strat-tax-voice-as-god-...
You hear pains from teams like Maps, who were moved from iOS to services during my tenure, and who immediately ran into serious organizational problems, dried up budgets, and so on. The gettin' is good in iOSville, and once you leave iOS, it's a whole 'nother Apple. There's a common story about the origin of Maps at Apple where Maps was basically given a blank check, and they're still mopping up some of that excess to this day. That doesn't happen in services.
Meanwhile, organizationally, Siri is kind of outside the typical services structure for various legacy reasons and they're off iterating like all getout and having a blast without the encumberance of the services organization. Every time I met with Siri I always came away with questions like, in this organizational climate, how on earth are they getting so much done?
Apple needs a serious Microsoftism on services. If you would have told me five years ago that Microsoft under Nadella would completely reverse course and embrace the living hell out of services while Apple meandered in the "let's buy companies to implement our services strategy" grasslands, I'd have said the opposite is more likely, yet here we are.
The worst part of that is that there is no way to manually export that data and back it up yourself.
Its worse now because Apple is only providing some information as ebooks and not pdfs. So, I get something that can loose my notes and I cannot print out (sorry, I sometimes like to read on something without an LCD).
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I just don't like this whole move to cloud computing and centralized data store.
The moral is don't trust ANYONE for anything you care about [1]. Especially free services - the free service you use can go under or away in a matter of days. Example: google code.
I'm not saying don't use "cloud" services - but always think about what will happen if someone attempts to delete the wrong LUN on some random SAN.
Google Code is a bad example, as it was announced 9 months before the actual closure, and it's pretty easy to take out your data from there. But, I get your point completely.
The same with G Drive btw, it keeps wanting to send an f'ing G Drive link. It is such a denial of reality, this pretence that email attachments don't exist.
>If you need to access a file that you recently deleted, you might be able to recover it from iCloud.com. Sign in to iCloud.com, click Settings > Data & Security, then browse the list of files in the Recover Documents tab. Files will be removed from Recover Documents in 30 days.
Particularly insuting would be if they shut down your account after making the complaint, or something like that.
So. What is the fuzz?
A bit like standalone digital camera losing out to smartphones despite obvious quality difference. In this case, dropbox does not even have an obvious quality benefit: syncing is a bit of a lemon market and in any case it works perfectly for most people the majority of the time.
I'm both an iCloud and a Dropbox customer. The fact that I chose to pay for iCloud despite paying for Dropbox is my anecdotal evidence of the perceived value of iCloud "other services" (which I admit is Apple ecosystem prison - just sweet enough a prison you don't want to break free). I trust Dropbox - but I know that eventually, if iCloud does not betray me for a while I will be tempted to save some money on it.
The context makes your quote sound like hubris rather than wisdom.
And it's a goddamm disaster if that's the case.
1. slow 2. bugs that delete your data 3. company goes bust or dark for whatever reason 4. your private data is available to voyeuristic employees, hackers, spies, advertisers, researchers, monetizers, anyone who offers to buy it, stalkers, dragnets, and anyone who buys their used disk drives on ebay.
No thanks.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image . It uses 8MB chunks by default which sync quite quickly.
I have my important files backed up to S3 and to a VPS, besides a local HD, using git-annex, and it suffers from none of those problems. If my VPS provider goes bust or S3 eats my data, I just open a new account elsewhere and "git annex copy" the files to it.
I think iCloud is quite revealing of Apple's incompetence as well as the contempt they have for the very users they claim to love. The fact that they think this is OK and normal is, in my opinion, quite disturbing. The same applies to changes made to OSX over the last few years. Incomprehensible, arrogant and full of contempt for users.
That said, they're both brain-dead UIs, yes.
I never liked the idea of stub files with tools like this. I used Livedrive a few years ago and the whole stub files gives a false sense of security. The only benefit it provided was I could double click the stub file and prioritise the download.
Theoretically.
Personally, any product that allows accidental deletion in one place that gets synchronised across all devices is a bad, bad thing. It only takes one virus or rogue app to delete the contents of a directory and the iCloud software will do it's thing and spread it.
During testing, all three of those services incorrectly deleted files when the cloud service got confused about synchronization. So for the particular application I had in mind, I wasn't able to use any of them and had to write scripts to handle the synchronization myself.
I'd love to see a blog post describing your test protocol, if you have time to write one.
Also, it's reminiscent of the Steam on Linux bug (though not as catastrophic); it's well within the realm of possibility.
I installed the script and ran "dropbox" on a new machine. Maybe It was because I created the destination folder before maybe because I had to kill the deamon at sometime to restart... no idea. It begun to delete my entire stuff in the dropbox.
Not really a problem for me because I store no important stuff in it, but i was kinda buffled. Even it could be a mistake by me, this stuff should not happen so fast.
To me this is not fine. Usually dragging from a different device(USB Thumbdrive <-> hard drive, SD Card <-> Thumbdrive, ....) should copy the files, and the cloud should be considered as another device.
Could a Mac user confirm if this is the default behavior on Mac devices?
C T Corporation System
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Don't Say I Never Did Nothin' Fer Ya.
On this last issue, Apple has the reputation of being one of the best technology corporations. However according to their legal guidelines (http://images.apple.com/privacy/docs/legal-process-guideline...) they will and do give at least:
Device Registration (name, address, email address, and telephone numbe, iCloud Apple ID)
Customer Service Records
iTunes (name, physical address, email address, and telephone number, purchase/download transactions and connections, update/re-download connections, and iTunes Match connections, iTunes subscriber information and connection logs with IP addresses, specific content purchased or downloaded).
Apple Retail Store Transactions (cash, credit/debit card, or gift card transactions, type of card, name of the purchaser, email address, date/time of the transaction, amount of the transaction, and store location, receipt number)
Apple Online Store Purchases (name, shipping address, telephone number, email address, product purchased, purchase amount)
iTunes Gift Cards (sixteen-digit alphanumeric code, nineteen-digit code, any purchases, name of the store, location, date, and time, user account
iCloud (music, photos, documents, iCloud email, encryption keys, Subscriber Information, iCloud feature connections, connection logs with IP addresses, Mail Logs, records of incoming and outgoing communications such as time, date, sender email addresses, and recipient email addresses, Email Content, Other iCloud Content, Photo Stream, Docs, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, iOS Device Backups, stored photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and iOS device backups, photos and videos in the users’ camera roll, device settings, app data, iMessage, SMS, and MMS messages and voicemail)
Find My iPhone (including connection logs
Other Available Device Information (MAC Address for Bluetooth, Ethernet, WiFi, or FireWire)
Requests for Apple Retail Store Surveillance Videos
Game Center (Connection logs with IP addresses, specific game(s) played)
iOS Device Activation (including upgrades the software, IP addresses, ICCID numbers, and other device identifiers)
Sign-on Logs (iTunes, iCloud, My Apple ID, and Apple Discussions, Connection logs with IP addresses, Sign-on transactional records)
My Apple ID and iForgot Logs (password reset actions, Connection logs with IP addresses)
FaceTime (logs when a FaceTime call invitation is initiated, content protected by 15 bits of entropy if secure enclave baked key is obtained from manufacturer)
But this blurb fails to mention that the user provided passcode can only be about 15 bits of user supplied entropy - the rest is provided by a hardware manufacturer that is also obligated by law to respond to legal request.
How do you figure that?
log(10000)/log(2) ~ 15.
I mean I could probably come up with pages of instances where services are changing features, remove features, or go under. Remember Google Wave (I know people in business context that was using it)? How about when Github pulled uploads (but then reintroduced them later as "Releases") [2]?
[1] https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=...
Tragically, the modal user has no backups and is more likely to lose their stuff than the cloud providers, at least in the medium term. This and the security issue lead to what Schneier calls the "feudal system": pick a provider, trust them with everything, hope for the best.
I can't wait to use this excuse for any future bug. "Yeah, it happens, but you can recover from it, so it's not a problem".
Let me try it now with a problem we're having in staging: "You keep getting kicked out, but can log in again and keep working? Yeah, it happens, but you can recover from it. It is not a problem"
Anyway, some time after I had ripped and cataloged all of that old music, I decided it might be a good idea to back it all up to an external hard drive for safekeeping. I hadn't really paid much attention to file sizes or anything, but I knew I had about 36GB total. Curiously, after copying to the hard drive, I saw I only had about 25GB on there. This was too big a discrepancy even knowing I hadn't really looked at my library before copying. So I dug in, and I realized that the vast majority of MP3s purchased online were missing completely. There was an odd song here or there, but there wasn't a complete album (and I almost always buy the whole album in MP3 format) either on the backup or in iTunes itself. From what I could tell, all of my ripped music was there, but it was as if iTunes decided to "forget" that I also had all those purchased MP3s, and somehow had deleted them from my library without asking me.
Further investigation revealed that the few remaining MP3s were all available in the iTunes Store for purchase, and almost all the missing music was not available for purchase from Apple. It's mostly indie and obscure stuff so that in itself isn't surprising, but I found it intriguing that iTunes somehow deleted music that it couldn't have sold me. I honestly think that's more coincidence than anything, since a small percentage of the deleted music was available from Apple at the time, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
The story has a happy ending though: I had previously backed up my purchased MP3s onto DVD-R media, so I never actually lost anything. But that was the last day I ever used iTunes for anything.
Added songs to iTunes outside of the iTunes store, and months later went back to play the song but couldn't find it in iTunes.
The first few times I chucked it up to me being crazy and misremembering but by the third and fourth time I was sure I wasn't.
I started putting my iTunes directory in a git repo but that didn't highlight any files that got spontaneously deleted which made me wonder if they were really gone. I checked the filesystem and they were right there where they should be.
I'm glad to hear that it wasn't just me, for the longest time I though I messed something up because my friends who use the iTunes store almost exclusively had no such problem.
I'm still on the lookout for an acceptable iTunes replacement that is open source and that can talk to my newish iPod. (Smart playlists are a must)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lawsuit-apple-delete-...
Not sure how that gets fixed.
2) Tried creating a folder, uploading 200 MB file in it and moving the folder to to local drive. Works as expected. After upload finished, the folder reappeared with the file in it.
So, the files waiting to be uploaded won't disappear.
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/05/how-to-set-up-a-complex-p...
Of course this isn't ever actually used - in practice users choose four to eight digit passcodes.
Users should, if they want to secure their information, use a randomly chosen passcode of approximately 30 digits long.
That's just what people like to say without any quantifiable metrics (usually just with some random data points about this or that bug, but not quantifiably compared to previous releases).
Millions of people use it everyday for professional work, including in film and music studios, where stability and timely performance are much more paramount than for some corporate cubicle running Excel.
I've not seen anything actually actively deteriorate. The Finder is much better, Spotlight is much more robust than before, apps run fine, etc.
There have been bad moves, like the change to their custom DNS responder thing which was not ready for production. Or some glitches here and there. But I've seen such things all the way down to 10.1 were I started. There will always be bugs when you add new features (and even when you don't add anything, as technologies around your OS also change).
Plus the upcoming release is a "Snow Leopard" like bugfix affair too, which will help things.
This can be said about Windows
The main issue with Windows, if there is one nowadays, is some UI cohenrece, not bugs and stability.
It is ? You are referring to Yosemite ? Genuinely curious...
* Trying to save files in Pages/Numbers, I get an error "Cannot save file. File does not exist." (Well of course it doesn't exist, I haven't saved it yet!) Lost several hours of work multiple times because I couldn't save files. And that is a total shit error message.
* Trying to move folders on a remote server. I get a dialog that says "Finder wants to make changes" and asks for my admin password. (What changes? WTF?) Files got deleted when moved. And also a total shit 'warning' message.
OS X is far more frustrating and useless than any other OS I've ever used. It doesn't give reasonable error messages, and it doesn't keep your stuff safe. It's a confusing minefield.
As long as everything I do is in a non-Apple application, I can get things done. And don't even get me started on OS X mouse support.
All software sucks. The only reason you think OSX sucks more than other OSs is because you haven't had time to discover the work-arounds for annoying buggy behaviour.
Extrapolating from that experience (which might be entirely to the remote server setup or network issues) is not exactly scientific.
The only way to fix it AFAIK is to reboot. (Doesn't that remind you of Windows?)
My colleagues have encountered the same issue.
Individual products will always have their pros/cons, and the company will have strengths (design) and weaknessess (social, some cloud services).
But to say they're bad at software just isn't true.
The server file deletion might be, but I'm doubtful. In either case, it was OS X that was giving useless error messages. Like this, except I wasn't moving it to trash:
Not that he/the article is wrong. After all, how good can a recovery feature be if you don't know about it when you need to recover data?
In any case, it's not something that ever affected me.
Also, stay classy, downvoters.
