Apple Explains Rare iOS 17.5 Bug That Resurfaced Deleted Photos (9to5mac.com) 59
Apple has shed more light on the bizarre iOS 17.5 bug that caused long-deleted photos to mysteriously reappear on users' devices. In a statement to 9to5Mac, the iPhone maker clarified that the issue stemmed from a corrupted database on the device itself, not iCloud Photos. This means the photos were never fully erased from the device, but they also weren't synced to iCloud. Interestingly, these files could have hitched a ride to new devices through backups or direct transfers.
Hold my beer (Score:5, Funny)
Ah yes (Score:5, Funny)
A corrupted database. Is that like you're holding your phone wrong?
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You would expect that what you see is what is stored, regardless of any database corruption. Obviously, such a sane idea had no place in the design of this system.
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Likely a corrupted filesystem db. I worked on FS issue earlier today (not apples) and the given FS was 135GB in size and reported 1GB actually used but no free space at all (totally full) so we went looking for the missing 134G, after examining the typical reasons for this, we moved on to the possible, but rarely seen. The theory is it crashed while the files+directories were deleted but still open and the files/nodes were simply lost (not in free blocks list, and not connected to a filename/directory).
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If it only deletes the photo file, then it would try to show the photo and fail, and that would lead to users complaining, and the bug fixed. If it only removes the name without deleting the file, then everything looks perfectly fine. You have a file that you shouldn't have, but you will never kn
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This was my initial guess for the root cause, so I am not surprised. iPhotos has so many duplicate databases on an older computer that it is easy to "find" deleted versions of something. The databases also got corrupted frequently, especially when trying to synchronize photos with slow external systems.
Uhm... no. Just no. (Score:2)
It makes a wonderful explanation but... no.
Especially that last line.
"It wasn't in the cloud, but it might have used the cloud to move to a new device via backups"
Heh. Depending on people not knowing how computers work at all, in the slightest.
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All the denials specifically name iCloud Photos.
What I didn't see at all was an explanation that 17.5 includes automatic database repair or any technical explanation.
Maybe that exists and I missed it or maybe it's a secret update or maybe it's BS.
Until they come clean on the A5 GPU intentional backdoor I'll presume BS to begin with.
Open Source is a floor for being taken seriously on security claims.
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I guess you don't know what "floor" means in this context. Think "Necessary but not sufficient".
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Open Source is a floor for being taken seriously on security claims.
Nonsense. The correct code would have been: "Remove name of photo from the database. Delete photo file". Sometimes what was executed was only "Remove name of photos from the database". That would have been just as invisible in open source code.
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Nope, the correct way is to mark the photo in the db as 'to be deleted', delete the photo, remove the entry from the db.
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The phrase is, "Interestingly, these files could have hitched a ride to new devices through backups or direct transfers."
This is an important semantic distinction. What is "the cloud"? If you take it to mean any presence of the bits anywhere other than right on your phone, you're not using the term "cloud" in the way that people or industry do. If you're talking about pictures, audio, or other bits of media, being in the cloud means that the file has a life cycle and individual presence online. You can retr
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The phrase is, "Interestingly, these files could have hitched a ride to new devices through backups or direct transfers."
If you buy a new phone and dump your old one, you do a backup on the old phone and a restore on the new one. Backup and restore make sure that the contents of the new phone is exactly the contents of the old phone. If the old phone contained files that it shouldn't, then obviously the new phone will contain the exact same files.
Don't know what is meant by "direct transfer". There was no UI to show these files, so there was no UI to send them to another phone. No UI to attach them to a mail message, for e
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You can actually transfer your phone to a new one directly. No remote backup involved.
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Heh. Depending on people not knowing how computers work at all, in the slightest.
These are Apple customers we're talking about, after all. That's their core market.
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Most care not one whit about the 'walled garden', they only want their shit to work seamlessly across their iPhone, i
Re: Uhm... no. Just no. (Score:2)
No one said anything about the cloud in the bit about migration to a new device. Appleâ(TM)s device migration uses your local network.
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No one said anything about the cloud in the bit about migration to a new device. Appleâ(TM)s device migration uses your local network.
When you set up a new system, one of the first questions is whether you will set up it from scratch or use a backup - and your iCloud backups for ipads and iphones are listed as alternatives, with dates and name of the device.
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When you set up a new system, one of the first questions is whether you will set up it from scratch or use a backup - and your iCloud backups for ipads and iphones are listed as alternatives, with dates and name of the device.
Setting up your new device with data from the old device is much faster. But it doesn't work if a truck drove over your old phone, or it fell into a lake. Or some mad hacker hacked it with a pick axe. That's why you have iCloud backups (or backups on your Mac).
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Heh. Depending on people not knowing how computers work at all, in the slightest.
Which, to be fair, is pretty accurate fo 99% or so of all people. They are also admitting to gross incompetence, because in a competent design, the state you see is the state of the data. Not so here. But again, 99% of all people will not understand that. It is almost as if technology has gotten complicated enough that vendors can openly admit selling crap products because most people will not understand the explanation.
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Hasn't that been true for decades?
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Well, for /., I would say 90% "no clue" vs. probably 99% "no clue" in the general population.
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It definitely has been. But computers have crept into everybody's lives now. Even most of those that steadfastly refused to have a "real" computer at home now have a mobile multi-core workstation in their possession that they use all the time.
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"It wasn't in the cloud, but it might have used the cloud to move to a new device via backups"
Sure. Say you have 10,000 photos on your iPhone that should be there because you want to see them. And 20 that you tried to delete, that are not visible to you, but that are there.
If you do a backup to iCloud, the backup has no idea what should be there and what shouldn't be there. It just sees files and copies them. That's the 10,000 photos you wanted backed up, plus the 20 that you didn't even know about. It's pointless to complain about 20 photos that you wanted deleted backed up in iCloud when your 1
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"We found the glitch and we fixed it." (Score:2)
"So it'll just work itself out naturally. We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end." --Apple, Inc.
Your fault (Score:1)
Assuming we even believe their explanation, how convenient that it is on the user side. Now it's easy to imply that it's the end users' fault.
This smells like standard corporation BS.
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Almost ALL of my prior clients never made backups, and acted like they shouldn't have to (this was way before Apple created the Time machine capability)
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Undelete (Score:5, Informative)
To play the devils advocate here, actually deleting data is something that normally don't happen in any OS.
Only the file entry is deleted and the sectors marked as "free".
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Not not we have SSDs with TRIM support. They erase unused blocks in minutes, sometimes seconds even. It prepares them to be re-written.
It's a big deal in the forensics world, and for data recovery services.
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Not not we have SSDs with TRIM support. They erase unused blocks in minutes, sometimes seconds even. It prepares them to be re-written.
TRIM should take practically no time at all. Your SSD has logical blocks (like a 1TB SSD has 250,000,000 logical 4k blocks) and a higher number of physical blocks (maybe 260,000,000 physical blocks), A TRIM command cuts that connection. A TRIM command for logical blocks 1,000,000 to 1,001,000 just makes a note that these blocks are not mapped to any physical blocks anymore. Yes, when data is written the controller must find a range of say 32 zeroed blocks, but that can wait until it is needed. And if you tr
Re:Undelete (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old days, to a point yes, the file entry was deleted from the directory, and however space to the file was allocated, was marked available. And then at some point the actual data may get overwritten or partly overwritten when space is needed. So the actual data in files could be overwritten immediately, or might linger on for ages and could be recovered.
But this isn't really true anymore since the advent of solid state storage, and modern flash/SSD implementations. Between wear levelling algorithms that actively moves things around and actively distributes activity, and TRIM that actively wipes available space to speedup future writes -- free space doesn't just linger around waiting for something to maybe eventually need to be written there anymore.
"Free space" is actively recycled, and often very quickly, now.
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In the old days, you had a single tasking operating system, so running undelete could work because you knew after you deleted it, no changes to the filesystem have taken place because this was the age where caching wasn't a thing - DOS would sit at the prompt and as long as nothing touched the computer, it was basically guaranteed to be recoverable.
PC Tools and Norton Utilities would say if you needed to undelete a file, to just run the tool off the floppy and not install it - in case you did delete that v
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Windows has had the recyling bin since Windows 95.
And the menu item for it is going to be next to something no matter where they put it. I'm not sure what you propose to get around that.
And next to 'rename' isn't terrible, because almost nobody savvy uses the "rename" command, they just click the file name, pause, and click the filename again to put it into edit mode to rename it. I'm not sure how far back that's been possible -- maybe all the way back to win 95?
Also, apparently, it was actually present in
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And next to 'rename' isn't terrible, because almost nobody savvy uses the "rename" command, they just click the file name, pause, and click the filename again to put it into edit mode to rename it. I'm not sure how far back that's been possible -- maybe all the way back to win 95?
I remember it was there in MacOS using HFS before HFS+. The reason I know is there was a bug: File names ABC and abc are considered equal. So renaming ABC to abc would do nothing - the filename would still be displayed as ABC. Renaming it to ABC1 and then to abc was fine. (I actually had customers complaining and had to do that workaround),
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To stretch it so far, you're Lucifer's advocate...
The probabilities involved in the images coming back under the same name and non corrupted in that scenario are quite low. And as mentioned, we're on flash storage with TRIM now...
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For a company that claims to be about security and privacy, I'd make sure that a deleted file never becomes undeleted. But apple has always sucked at software so what can you expect.
The files were never deleted. There is no OS function to "undelete" a file. And on an SSD drive with TRIM, the controller can actually make it 100% impossible (without any effort).
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To play the devils advocate here, actually deleting data is something that normally don't happen in any OS. Only the file entry is deleted and the sectors marked as "free".
This wasn't about a missing delete on the file system level - the pictures were deleted from the photo library. That puts them in the trashcan where they live until you restore them, you select to permanently delete them, or 30 days pass by. Something went wrong with the latter.
Very believable (Score:2)
I mean, they wouldn't lie, would they?
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I believe them. While they are admitting to gross incompetence, most people will not be able to understand that so their risk is small. And in case there is any lawsuit, they cannot be accused of lying.
Resilience has left the building (Score:2)
You would think that what you see is in sync with what is stored. But that would be robust, resilient design and obviously, Apple is above that.
Apple's non explanation .. (Score:2)
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“the files could have persisted from one device to another when .. when restoring from an iCloud Backup [9to5mac.com] but not using iCloud Photos.”
That means the photos are removed from the photo library, but the files themselves weren't deleted - just the link to them from the photo library. No big surprise that a backup will include them.
Imagine that (Score:2)
Any of you still need an explanation? Or do you want to stick to your fantasies about how computers work?
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No wonder my phone storage keeps shrinking (Score:2)
I mean this half jokingly, but seriously, the amount of storage on my phone shrinks daily even when I tell apps to autodelete unused content, or for things to be cloud stored. It is highly believable to me that they've been leaking bits this whole time.