Lost iCloud-Stored Photos Have Been Found ⇥ koingosw.com

Speaking of data loss and backups, Josh Hill has a followup post:

I wrote in to upper management and explained the situation, and made a desperate plea to anyone in the tech community who could help provide suggestions. Tons of previous customers wrote in with their own horror stories from their digital pasts, gave various ideas to help out, and even donated to keep us afloat during the week we had to halt operations.

Why did we shut down until we found a resolution? Working on systems where data loss has occurred, writing new files to the disk, substantially reduces the chance of recovering any data. Or worse, maybe we could trigger the same bug again, without knowing what cause it, and lose more data.

After a few days, Apple’s backend engineers were finally able to recover what now seems to be all of the lost data, despite what the phone-in agent stated.

This is a great resolution, and I am happy that Hill’s precious photos were found. There are plenty of people who care about this stuff at Apple and understood the urgency of finding them. But all of this is meaningless without a guarantee. I am not reassured by this resolution if the bug Hill documented still seems to exist in the shipping version of MacOS 13.3, and without a promise that similar recovery steps would be taken for any user. I also do not love that Hill removed the original article and excluded it from the Wayback Machine because I think these things are important to document, even if they are later corrected, but that is just a me problem.