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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.
ooh, not a boot loop but an exciting new thing: on the second attempt it did boot, but it doesn't respond to touch input and there's no home button haptics. i can bring up the password prompt but not enter the password. exciting!!!
huh, putting an iphone into recovery mode is easier than expected, you basically just keep holding the power button after the apple logo shows up. nice. i guess dfu is an even more last-resort mode then
i regret to inform you that apple's recovery mode handling will start downloading firmware without checking if there's enough space on the host to store it. i was forced to force kill it so my laptop won't die
maybe a good thing i was forced to abort preparing to use recovery mode, because on a third attempt my phone did actually boot into a usable state, and i can rescue my photos from the last two weeks! there's tons of should-be-deleted apps with placeholder icons though…
here's my suspicion: in worst-case scenarios, maybe iOS is able to roll back to a previous filesystem snapshot or something? or maybe there's multiple partitions and they're not all in sync? god knows. i'll salvage what i can and then restore from backup.
(realises 15GB of disk space is just dedicated to ANGLE) aaaaaaaaaaa
oh and then my laptop suddenly involuntarily hibernated due getting down to 5% battery or whatever the threshold is, which is either due to apple's usb-c hub thing not being able to provide enough power or due to me having set the max charge level to 80%, idk. great day today.
while i'm upset at apple, did you know that photo sync between an iphone and an mac is one-way? you can sync the library from your mac to your iphone, and you can separately import new photos, but if you for example move something between folders on your phone, that's not synced
by the way, deleting files on a mac that is using time machine doesn't immediately free the space for them, i think? because it's always keeping old apfs snapshots of the filesystem around so they can be synced to your backup drive, so the deleted file is still in the snapshot.
maybe something similar goes on with ios, idk
when your phone dies you see your life flash before your eyes (photos being imported one by one over usb)
oh my god the fact that signal does not provide ANY way to export or backup message history on ios is awful. you can move it to a new device, but right now i have to restore an old backup on my current device, so i've spent half an hour desperately screenshotting/saving stuff
i completely understand why signal want to make it difficult for you to make a copy of your message history, but in this case it meant i nearly lost like, all the precious photos my friends sent me from a thing we did together. i could always ask them to re-send me them, but 😭
when did ios firmware images become like 8GB and why does it take far longer to extract the image than to download it
why does it take more than half an hour to extract. this computer has an ssd and is basically not doing anything else. apple what are you doing
actually in the recovery process now. it's so cute how the progress bar displayed on the phone under the apple logo is synced with the progress bar displayed on the computer
not looking forward to how, after my phone has been restored, i will also have to wipe and set up my watch again, despite my watch being just fine. this one's entirely apple's fault. the apple watch is not a fully independent device, it's paired to the phone and mirrors its data.
the data on an apple watch doesn't belong to the watch, if that makes sense. everything stored on an apple watch is basically a temporary copy of data stored on the iphone it's paired to, and the iphone copy is authoritative. this is reasonable but like anything it has tradeoffs.
my phone restored and now it's “upgrading” (apple force you to upgrade the ios version when restoring so i guess it has to do some migration stuff) and… huh, my watch is also doing something??? did my phone do this? does that mean it re-paired or what???
hello from my restored iphone! incredibly, i was apparently wrong about the apple watch? perhaps apple must have changed how this works: it seems to have automatically re-paired synced the last two weeks of fitness data back to my phone. nothing lost. i'm impressed!
