social.noyu.me

hi here's a report from the depths of hell: don't let an iOS device get below 1GB of free space, you absolutely can get it to a point of no return, where deleting apps no longer appears to work, and the preferences app crashes when trying to view the available free space

it is very unfortunate that this device runs iOS and therefore i effectively do not own it and can't inspect it myself to see how it's fucked itself and potentially fix it. i am just going to have to live with two weeks of data loss.

i think i might have stressed it to the point that the filesystem has become corrupted in some way, because if deleting huge things does not fix a free-disk-space crisis, that makes me think it's not actually managing to free the space, which could be consistent with a broken fs?

also when i say things don't delete: first of all, it takes a long time for the deletion to finish and for the app to disappear from the home screen. secondly, rebooting the device brings the app back. that's…… not a good sign at all. the consistency seems a bit, eventual,

yeah it's over, this device is toast. can't even view my photos, the app just crashes. well, thankfully i don't think i did anything important in the last two weeks…

time for the anger stage of loss. let me tell you how i got here: apple's storage ratchet.

i take a lot of photos, they function as a diary essentially. i refuse to store them in the cloud because i don't want some cop to be able to request ten years of my life history.

since they aren't in the cloud, i need space for them on my phone. but of course, apple refuses to provide user-expandable or upgradeable storage, because storage is their way of forcing you to buy either services from them (cloud), a new device, or a vastly more expensive device

so… photos just kind of accumulate on my phone, right. hence the disk space crunch.

now, of course, to avoid them using an infinite amount of storage, the solution is to delete older ones. but i don't want to lose those, so i want to ensure they're backed up somewhere else…

so, apple provides a solution whereby i can connect my phone to my laptop over usb, and import photos from it into my library. i've done that plenty of times before and i do have years of photos saved this way, so i could have deleted some of those years from my phone.

if i had done this then the crisis wouldn't have gotten this bad, and i wish i had. it's just that i don't really want to delete, like, all my photos from 2018 and 2019 off my phone. i like having those available for quick reference. and if i had more storage i wouldn't have to

but the storage crisis goes deeper. i mentioned backups before, but i should have said “copies”. because i also do regular proper backups of my phone. once again, i do not use the cloud because i don't want a cop to be able to request my entire life history from apple.

so instead i use apple's encrypted backups feature. when my phone is on the same wifi network as my laptop, or connected over usb, it automatically makes an encrypted snapshot of the entire phone on my mac. it's a great feature. only one problem: my laptop is also made by apple.

do you see where this is going? my laptop is also subject to the apple storage ratchet. again i refuse to use cloud storage here. so, my laptop is also running low on disk space.

so, occasionally backups from my phone to my laptop fail due to low disk space.

and here's the cursed thing: not only does the error message not tell you which device is low on disk space, the process of making a backup requires free disk space on the device to be backed up. which means you may have to lose data in order to not lose data.

also the backup process is frustratingly flaky and slow even with ample disk space and a good wifi connection, so… i tend to back up my phone more like once a month rather than weekly or daily. hence me losing two weeks' worth of data.

but okay so i have a disk space crisis on my laptop too. but why does that affect my phone backups?

well of course, apple don't let you back up your phone to an external drive. the backup must go to the internal drive. so… not only would i need a new phone, but a new laptop.

but you might think, hey, can't you just symlink it to your external drive and see what happens?

yeah, i tried that! it turns out apple's phone backup tool copies files in a pathological worst case randomised ordering that is torture for an hdd, and effectively requires an ssd.

and since all my photos are on the internal drive too, this means that i end up with two copies of them: the imported ones and the ones backed up from my phone. so they effectively use up twice as much disk space on my laptop as on my phone.

but okay, obviously i should free up some space on my laptop by moving stuff to an external drive? my laptop may not have an sd card reader, but i can still plug in a drive over usb?

sure, i could do that. actually i have moved a bunch of stuff. but…

but i want all my data to have backups. i use apple's time machine for this and, you guessed it, it only backs up data stored on the internal drive. anything i'd have on an external drive would have to be backed up manually. also i'd need a second external drive, that's a thing.

and of course i lose the convenience factor of having everything with me anywhere i go. i'm not saying that's the best idea, i mentioned already why i don't use the cloud and i'm putting my data at risk by travelling with it also, but… still.

anyway, uh. i'm not going to defend my choices exactly, but you can see how they all cascade to a point where “buy phone with even more storage” and “buy laptop with even more storage” are the easiest solutions to all of my problems. but i use apple products, so this is expensive

and then, finally, i need to point out that i have been (deliberately) unemployed for 15 months now and so i'm really reluctant to pay whatever extortionate price apple require for a new phone with Lots of storage and a new laptop with Even More storage. hence me putting it off.

i said “apple storage ratchet” because i'm effectively forcing myself to buy a higher storage tier each time (ratcheting: goes forward but not back), but i maybe should have said “racket” because have you seen what apple charges for higher-storage skus? it's utterly obscene

anyway uh. are there android phones that let you store photos on an external sd card and encrypt them? asking for a friend.

wow i have never seen an iphone start up to the apple logo, stay there for a while (a minute maybe?), then have the logo disappear, appear to turn off, then have it appear again… this is gonna be a boot loop isn't it.

@hikari mostly curiosity, what model iphone is this?