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.

@hikari I once measured that I could attribute about 50% of my phone’s idle drain to trying to talk to my computer wirelessly and sync itself