Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/25/why-deleted-iphone-photos-came-back.html
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It’s plausible, but to me this sounds more like a soft-delete gone wrong. Which is not uncommon. Which is why people really need to think hard before coding soft-deletes.
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Not sure what you consider a soft-delete, but my guess is you mean that files are not actually deleted. It wasn‘t that, but a fix that restored files from a corrupt database, but without checking if they already were in the bin, but still within the 30 days before they‘re auto-deleted.
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Like the man says, “There is no cloud, just somebody else’s computer.”
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True, however why do you refer to a cloud when this issue has nothing to do with any cloud?
Sounds cloudy enough for me.
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Yeah, all I have been reading suggests the restored photos were on the device, that the iCloud library wasn’t the issue. It wasn’t re-copying back off of the net, but setting the file’s state from “deleted” back into existing in the database.
And honestly, it seems like the sort of decision you would want an update to make when encountering a file who might be deleted, but might not, to err on the side of letting the user mark the file again for deletion rather than risk having them be upset that the file disappeared.
On a side note, all too often we forget the nitty gritty of how files are actually stored, that part of why files are not actually deleted but their registers marked for overwriting is because all media wears out. This reduces wear and tear on the memory. In the old days it was the magnetic charge that would weaken over time, and though I don’t really understand how SSD memory works I recall reading that the bits tend to freeze over time, so it’s common to flip them as little as possible.
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