- I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for her
- She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes?? What did you do?"
- I break out in a cold sweat
- I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app
- I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the Notes
- We call Apple
- The support person ended up figuring out that we could essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they wouldn't be wiped out.
It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more warning/pop ups of the full impact of this.
PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in action.
Not excusing the footgun but I'm honestly amazed you could get an Apple rep to help you with notes syncing, let alone recover them. And they helped even if it seems like it was your own fault!
My employer pays (a lot) for Google products and even then there's no way they would ever help with that, let alone on the phone.
In the past I did get a rep on the phone to help with things like access control but I can already hear her tell me (politely) to get lost if I needed help with Keep notes disappearing (which they occasionally do!).
It shouldn’t be surprising that Apple’s support is way better than Google’s. Apple’s support is above-average, and Google’s support; even for paying customers, is a regular punchline.
Not sure what you're talking about, if you pay Google for support you get support.
Workspace support is good in my experience, we interact every 2-3 weeks and they can usually resolve our issues or know when to escalate. You can call or chat. I know that you can also get phone support as a consumer now via Google One, but I haven't had to use it yet personally.
Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear in any of the messaging.
You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud".
And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.
This. Turning sync off shouldn't delete notes from iCloud. It just doesn't sync the notes from iCloud to the specific device in question so they are not visible from that device. To confirm OP could have logged in icloud.com from browser and seen the notes there. Then you can decide on a per-device basis whether you want to sync notes and have them be visible on that specific device.
If it was true but it's not. The problem with believing rando people rather than reading from the actual source. They can only view your screen and only after you explicitly grant permission via a push notification.
Hm, any details on that "VNC" functionality? Is it iPad only, or iOS too? Was the approval request a system pop up? Did it open a named application? Did you see what they did on the screen when they were on it? Has this been written about anywhere?
Incorrect. Apple support can VIEW your screen but they can't make any changes. And just to note they can't view your screen with you approving via a push notification.
Also they cannot see password fields or your keyboard when using them, and the like, at least on iOS and iPadOS. Apple hides sensitive inputs in regular screen sharing as well, and occasionally when airplaying to a TV, for PIN codes for instance. It sometimes makes it difficult to provide remote help to novice family members, because you have to guess what they’re seeing.
Samsung has shipped a similar feature for phones and tvs for many years. Tech suppory can not connect randomly, the customer has to manually approve by entering a key. similar to how teamviewer does it.
Even if the iCloud account is on a shared plan, and one member of the family is responsible for managing it, they should not be making changes to any INDIVIDUAL device settings without checking with that device owner.
I would be livid if my partner had done that for me because they "thought 'we' probably didn't need it, so I turned it off for 'your' iPhone"
Yes a million times. But it's not even just iCloud -- it's something fundamental to so much Apple software.
The same thing happens to me repeatedly when I'm highlighting PDF's using Books -- every so often, I go back to a PDF and discover multiple pages of my most recent highlights are missing. It saves highlights as you go along, but sometimes for whatever mystery reason, it decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45.
These problems, of Apple silently overwriting newer content with an older version, have been going on for at least a decade at this point.
And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.
> And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.
Because the two hardest problems in software are cache invalidation, naming things, off by one errors, and buffer overflows from a lack of array index enforcement.
I've had my fair share of highlighting/annotating shenanigans with macOS built-in software and I've found Skim (free, BSD licensed) to be a highly competent replacement, with the only caveat that you have to remember to export the annotated PDFs if you want to be able to see your changes from any other application.
Anyone tired of Apple's contrast-killing orangey background and missing a true yellow color for their highlights should give it a try. (No affiliation, just glad it exists.)
Interesting point. I have used Apple computers on and off over the years, most recently from 2015- earlier this year. I think you are on to something re: philosophy. On the hardware side I remember when they did away with floppy disks (I'm getting old), optical drives, whole cpu architectures (3x!), etc. They do cut pretty brutally, and I guess when it comes to iCloud this seemingly extends to your files.
I'm not going to say its all bad, but it is less and less my style (the older I get, especially).
The other thing about Apple's software is that it neither fails gracefully nor does it warn the user. They give an appearance of "everything is fine" even when it isn't. They'd rather have an app crash and throw you to the homescreen rather than give an "app not responding" warning.
No because it's all local on my device. That's my point -- it's not just an iCloud thing, it's a local thing too.
(And I long ago turned off iCloud for Books hoping it would fix the problem, but it didn't. Which makes me suspect it's some kind of "local mode" for iCloud that's still open to these bugs.)
The author suggests using git. But be warned git doesn’t work well with iCloud Drive. I used to have hundreds of git repositories in my iCloud Drive. Periodically, doing a big commit would trigger my whole multi-hundred gigabyte iCloud Drive to resync with Apple’s servers. This would take a day to complete. I went through Apple support up to quite a high level to try to resolve it and they never did. Now I keep my git repositories outside of iCloud Drive. The trigger seems to be if you ever change hundreds of files at the same time in quick succession before the last set of big changes finished syncing.
I thought it was common knowledge that you shouldn't mix git (and similar VCS) with cloud drives and their cloud based version control (iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive etc.). The two don't mix well and there's room for all sorts of weird and unexpected behaviours especially if you have multiple devices synced to the same cloud drive.
Yup, you definitely shouldn't. I don't know if it's common knowledge so much as some git operation will start failing after the fifth commit, so you figure it out pretty quick.
I do have to say, I've never understood why git doesn't work well with cloud drives. File management seems like a straightforward enough set of operations that ought to be bulletproof. I've never understood what precise operation gets corrupted when using git, and how that's possible at all.
And I don't know if the fault is the cloud or git. Is it that the cloud returns errors 0.5% of the time, and git silently ignores those instead of retrying, and corrupts data? Or is it something about git reading and writing so many files so quickly that operations on the cloud drive somehow get lost or out of order but without generating errors? Both seem equally implausible, and yet...
My problem is, that I need to use iCloud Drive for some important files because the app I need to use doesn't support another way to sync.
Without git I wouldn't have figured out which files have changed. (And even with git, I can't be sure that I caught everything. I guess git content can also be altered by iCloud sync conflicts…)
you might store the git repo on a Dropbox folder (not a good idea in general, afaik clouds aren't reliable enough for git, but as a backup), this way git content can't be corrupted by iCloud?
Or maybe even locally if you don't need to commit on other computers, then you'll be certain that git is correct without any cloud intervention
My usual approach with valuable iCloud Drive folders is to have an automatic process rsync them somewhere else and auto-version them there (Git, Dropbox, etc.). This wouldn't be great for very large data, but most of what I care to aggressively version and keep that lives in iCloud Drive is text or otherwise small, for which having two copies is trivial.
For what it's worth, git also can fail in some pretty bizarre ways in Dropbox for much the same reasons. I've used git-remote-dropbox [1] in the past to use Dropbox as a git server.
The reason I did use them together for a few years is when I bought a new computer or went between two computers under the same iCloud Drive account I could pickup exactly where I left off in my development work without even thinking about it. Obviously, due to the issues it's not worth it though.
Hi, original author here. In my case it's not that I want to use git. I just need a way to see which files got changed. At least until I can move the last ones out. I still rely on one app that only syncs via iCloud Drive.
A much better reason to not use iCloud Drive is due to the fact that it's not end to end encrypted. Everything you store in it is readable by Apple sysadmins, support reps, and anyone who can compel them (like the US government can, without a warrant now).
Don't use non-e2ee services.
(Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.)
I use syncthing (e2ee, free software) to keep my files on all my machines. It has sane conflict handling and nice versioning backups. It even supports untrusted sync-only devices that never see plaintext so you can run a node on a vps or somewhere offsite safely.
>(Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.)
These are contradictory statements. It IS e2ee. I can easily convince friends and family to click through two menus to enable it. I can't easily convince my friends and family to go through the effort of installing syncthing on multiple devices and then go through with the configuration of them.
It's great you're a syncthing advocate, but telling people that icloud drive is bad just because they don't enable a setting that could cause an average user to lose all of their data if they lose the key is a little ridiculous. I GUARANTEE YOU that your grandmother would MUCH rather be able to call Apple to get her pictures of little johnny back when she forgets her password than have it "more secure by default".
And for many people, a paper that enables they recover their account feels (and likely is) much more assuring than the possibility of never getting in because you forgot things like when you created the account or any number of years-old purchases. The paper will live in a safe right next to other important documents like their Social Security Card or Passport.
” Encryption of certain metadata and usage information:
Some metadata and usage information stored in iCloud remains under standard data protection, even when Advanced Data Protection is enabled. For example, dates and times when a file or object was modified are used to sort your information, and checksums of file and photo data are used to help Apple de-duplicate and optimize your iCloud and device storage — all without having access to the files and photos themselves. Representative examples are provided in the table below. ……”
Worth noting a practical counter argument against e2ee: the vast majority of people are much more susceptible to losing all of their data because they forget or lose their encryption key compared to having their data compromised by admin staff or governments.
While I'd love to turn on e2ee, I don't trust myself enough to not lose the encryption key.
There is a recovery method for this too: a recovery contact:
” If you enable Advanced Data Protection and then lose access to your account, Apple will not have the encryption keys to help you recover it — you’ll need to use your device passcode or password, a recovery contact, or a personal recovery key. Because the majority of your iCloud data will be protected by end-to-end encryption, you’ll be guided to set up at least one recovery contact or recovery key before you turn on Advanced Data Protection. ”
I enabled Advanced Data Protection and put the recovery key in an encrypted 7zip file, then uploaded that file to Onedrive and Backblaze also picked it up. Every now and then I have a reminder on my phone to test-decrypt the recovery key locally to make sure I don't forget the encryption key.
> I don't trust myself enough to not lose the encryption key
If you're using a password manager, you can put the key in there. In effect this backs up the key (encrypted) to every device you install the password manager on, plus a cloud backup depending on what manager you're using.
How is manually turning on iCloud E2EE different to manually searching a provider that supports E2EE by default? This isn't like messaging where the other person also needs E2EE enabled.
The difference is that you know the provider is willing to ship surveillance-enabling footguns. They don't regard e2ee as core and necessary functionality.
Safe and secure providers will never touch the plaintext of any user ever, regardless of the user's configuration (or lack of it).
An example (although not in the e2ee sense) is that time Dropbox allowed logins to any account with any password provided. It illustrates that having a basic test suite over authentication systems wasn't important to them.
If you care about that, no provider is really safe (not everyone will copy LavaBit and close the business in response to being ordered to secretly reveal keys or otherwise allow snooping); however you can still make sure the thing being synchronised is an encrypted disk image or whatever.
Jep, i am really salty about that too. I used to store my Calibre library in the documents folder (where else would it live, right? Free backup included!). A while ago I discovered several book folders nested in the library that should contain the actual epub files… are empty. The directory structure is there, the database entries are there, but the book files are gone. Not all of them, just about 40%, at random.
Moral of the story, don’t store anything in iCloud Drive you like, especially not your books.
> If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.
I would like to argue this is at least partly the fault of app developers, for adding iCloud support without the conflict handling mechanism.
However, why does Xcode, Apple's own in-house app, not support conflict handling?! Apple's own software should be setting the standard for third-party developers. If they don't handle version conflicts, of course no one else will either.
Hi, original author here. Maybe I wrote it a bit misleading. The thing is: It's independent of the editor. Even if you use an editor that _does_ support conflict handling you can lose the content.
Just assume you write something, save, close the editor and never open it again. iCloud might replace the content of that file and there is no way for you to know.
The only way to prevent losing your data is setting up a Git repository or open _every important file_ regularly in an editor that supports conflict handling.
Ah, thank you! I assumed there was some Apple API which is supposed to handle this situation (that's how this really should work IMO), and the apps mentioned had decided to suppress the user message and just pick the newer version or some such.
However, Dropbox's "(John Doe’s conflicted copy)" solution is also pretty awful UX. I can understand why Apple would want to use its uniquely integrated software ecosystem to come up with a better system. I believe they could do it—but they clearly have not.
And if you keep files in iCloud Drive, your iPhone can remove the local copy any time.
So if you want your files to be synced and to be 100% sure you'll have a local copy - you should keep the same file in iCloud Drive and in the "On My iPhone" folder. This is the reason Apple Books, Numbers and all the apps that use iCloud Drive remove local copies all the time.
I made a simple note-taking app using iCloud Drive - iCloud was greedily removing a 2 kb txt-file when the app was closed (sometimes it wasn't removing - it's quite random). It doesn't matter if you have a lot of storage space - iCloud still can remove the local version of a file you constantly use.
The Apple developer support said nothing can be done. Even for a developer there is no way to mark a file as never to be removed.
P.S. In their official docs Apple actually recommends to keep all the user's files in iCloud Drive and _not_ to keep a copy "On My iPhone"
I’ve got a similar issue with a loss of Contacts. I has been happening for a while but I first thought the issue was me.
However on a morning I realized the contact of a friend I was texting with the night before was gone. I realized the problem was iCloud.
I reach out to Apple support, and after exhausting all the dummy options, the customer support representative admitted that this was a known issue, but they could not find the root cause. And there was no solution to it.
The asked me to monitor my contacts so that I could find when this deletion happen but I would need to give a few minutes range. Because “an iPhone generates a lot of logs and engineers cannot go through them unless we can pinpoint where it exactly happened”.
I thought that pinpointed the bug within a 8 hours range was already good, but the customer’s representative insisted on being accurate within minutes (saying the engineers said that).
Anyway, as all the hard case that I give to Apple Support, the representative said he would follow-up and call me back but never did. So nothing happened.
I move my contacts to Google and just forgot about it.
Readit News
- My wife had cloud sync on her iPhone for Notes
- I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for her
- She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes?? What did you do?"
- I break out in a cold sweat
- I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app
- I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the Notes
- We call Apple
- The support person ended up figuring out that we could essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they wouldn't be wiped out.
It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more warning/pop ups of the full impact of this.
PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in action.
My employer pays (a lot) for Google products and even then there's no way they would ever help with that, let alone on the phone.
In the past I did get a rep on the phone to help with things like access control but I can already hear her tell me (politely) to get lost if I needed help with Keep notes disappearing (which they occasionally do!).
Workspace support is good in my experience, we interact every 2-3 weeks and they can usually resolve our issues or know when to escalate. You can call or chat. I know that you can also get phone support as a consumer now via Google One, but I haven't had to use it yet personally.
You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud".
And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.
I feel as if your wife’s Problem was not Apple but the person administering her iOS devices.
Dead Comment
Am I the only one seeing this as a potential security vulnerability? Is there a way to permanently disable this?
Dead Comment
It's similar to FaceTime screen sharing, the support employee can only see a video feed of your screen but can't directly interact with it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212734
I'd love to be able to do that too when troubleshooting my mom's iPhone over a voice call (or trying to).
I'm sure you got an asswhooping. haha
Phones are individual/personal.
Even if the iCloud account is on a shared plan, and one member of the family is responsible for managing it, they should not be making changes to any INDIVIDUAL device settings without checking with that device owner.
I would be livid if my partner had done that for me because they "thought 'we' probably didn't need it, so I turned it off for 'your' iPhone"
The same thing happens to me repeatedly when I'm highlighting PDF's using Books -- every so often, I go back to a PDF and discover multiple pages of my most recent highlights are missing. It saves highlights as you go along, but sometimes for whatever mystery reason, it decides that the version of your PDF from 11:35 is the newest main one, not the one from 11:45.
These problems, of Apple silently overwriting newer content with an older version, have been going on for at least a decade at this point.
And I just don't understand how such a fatal flaw was ever built into the system in the first place, and how it still hasn't been fixed.
Because the two hardest problems in software are cache invalidation, naming things, off by one errors, and buffer overflows from a lack of array index enforcement.
Anyone tired of Apple's contrast-killing orangey background and missing a true yellow color for their highlights should give it a try. (No affiliation, just glad it exists.)
https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/
I'm not going to say its all bad, but it is less and less my style (the older I get, especially).
Wrong clock on some of the servers?
(And I long ago turned off iCloud for Books hoping it would fix the problem, but it didn't. Which makes me suspect it's some kind of "local mode" for iCloud that's still open to these bugs.)
I do have to say, I've never understood why git doesn't work well with cloud drives. File management seems like a straightforward enough set of operations that ought to be bulletproof. I've never understood what precise operation gets corrupted when using git, and how that's possible at all.
And I don't know if the fault is the cloud or git. Is it that the cloud returns errors 0.5% of the time, and git silently ignores those instead of retrying, and corrupts data? Or is it something about git reading and writing so many files so quickly that operations on the cloud drive somehow get lost or out of order but without generating errors? Both seem equally implausible, and yet...
My problem is, that I need to use iCloud Drive for some important files because the app I need to use doesn't support another way to sync.
Without git I wouldn't have figured out which files have changed. (And even with git, I can't be sure that I caught everything. I guess git content can also be altered by iCloud sync conflicts…)
Or maybe even locally if you don't need to commit on other computers, then you'll be certain that git is correct without any cloud intervention
[1] https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox
Don't use non-e2ee services.
(Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.)
I use syncthing (e2ee, free software) to keep my files on all my machines. It has sane conflict handling and nice versioning backups. It even supports untrusted sync-only devices that never see plaintext so you can run a node on a vps or somewhere offsite safely.
>(Yes, there is an opt-in e2ee for iCloud now. No, nobody is using it because it is off by default and buried in settings.)
These are contradictory statements. It IS e2ee. I can easily convince friends and family to click through two menus to enable it. I can't easily convince my friends and family to go through the effort of installing syncthing on multiple devices and then go through with the configuration of them.
It's great you're a syncthing advocate, but telling people that icloud drive is bad just because they don't enable a setting that could cause an average user to lose all of their data if they lose the key is a little ridiculous. I GUARANTEE YOU that your grandmother would MUCH rather be able to call Apple to get her pictures of little johnny back when she forgets her password than have it "more secure by default".
Well, not really…:
” Encryption of certain metadata and usage information: Some metadata and usage information stored in iCloud remains under standard data protection, even when Advanced Data Protection is enabled. For example, dates and times when a file or object was modified are used to sort your information, and checksums of file and photo data are used to help Apple de-duplicate and optimize your iCloud and device storage — all without having access to the files and photos themselves. Representative examples are provided in the table below. ……”
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
For example, file names in iCloud are not e2e, etc. etc.
While I'd love to turn on e2ee, I don't trust myself enough to not lose the encryption key.
” If you enable Advanced Data Protection and then lose access to your account, Apple will not have the encryption keys to help you recover it — you’ll need to use your device passcode or password, a recovery contact, or a personal recovery key. Because the majority of your iCloud data will be protected by end-to-end encryption, you’ll be guided to set up at least one recovery contact or recovery key before you turn on Advanced Data Protection. ”
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
If you're using a password manager, you can put the key in there. In effect this backs up the key (encrypted) to every device you install the password manager on, plus a cloud backup depending on what manager you're using.
Safe and secure providers will never touch the plaintext of any user ever, regardless of the user's configuration (or lack of it).
An example (although not in the e2ee sense) is that time Dropbox allowed logins to any account with any password provided. It illustrates that having a basic test suite over authentication systems wasn't important to them.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212520
I’m using it. And I’m perfectly okay with this being the default behaviour.
iCloud Drive is like, one of the only providers that has e2ee.
Settings > AppleID > iCloud > Advanced Data Protection
You'll see 'Add Recovery Contact' and underneath it you'll see 'Recovery Key' 'Off>'
Tap into it, agree to the notice, you'll get a 28 alphanumeric key and then re-enter that same key to finish the set-up.
Deleted Comment
Much easier to handle version conflicts if the file isn’t a black box.
Moral of the story, don’t store anything in iCloud Drive you like, especially not your books.
I would like to argue this is at least partly the fault of app developers, for adding iCloud support without the conflict handling mechanism.
However, why does Xcode, Apple's own in-house app, not support conflict handling?! Apple's own software should be setting the standard for third-party developers. If they don't handle version conflicts, of course no one else will either.
Just assume you write something, save, close the editor and never open it again. iCloud might replace the content of that file and there is no way for you to know.
The only way to prevent losing your data is setting up a Git repository or open _every important file_ regularly in an editor that supports conflict handling.
This is an iCloud bug, not an Xcode one.
Obviously, deleting data is bad.
However, Dropbox's "(John Doe’s conflicted copy)" solution is also pretty awful UX. I can understand why Apple would want to use its uniquely integrated software ecosystem to come up with a better system. I believe they could do it—but they clearly have not.
So if you want your files to be synced and to be 100% sure you'll have a local copy - you should keep the same file in iCloud Drive and in the "On My iPhone" folder. This is the reason Apple Books, Numbers and all the apps that use iCloud Drive remove local copies all the time.
I made a simple note-taking app using iCloud Drive - iCloud was greedily removing a 2 kb txt-file when the app was closed (sometimes it wasn't removing - it's quite random). It doesn't matter if you have a lot of storage space - iCloud still can remove the local version of a file you constantly use.
The Apple developer support said nothing can be done. Even for a developer there is no way to mark a file as never to be removed.
P.S. In their official docs Apple actually recommends to keep all the user's files in iCloud Drive and _not_ to keep a copy "On My iPhone"
However on a morning I realized the contact of a friend I was texting with the night before was gone. I realized the problem was iCloud.
I reach out to Apple support, and after exhausting all the dummy options, the customer support representative admitted that this was a known issue, but they could not find the root cause. And there was no solution to it.
The asked me to monitor my contacts so that I could find when this deletion happen but I would need to give a few minutes range. Because “an iPhone generates a lot of logs and engineers cannot go through them unless we can pinpoint where it exactly happened”.
I thought that pinpointed the bug within a 8 hours range was already good, but the customer’s representative insisted on being accurate within minutes (saying the engineers said that).
Anyway, as all the hard case that I give to Apple Support, the representative said he would follow-up and call me back but never did. So nothing happened.
I move my contacts to Google and just forgot about it.