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Apple’s Photo Bug Exposes the Myth of ‘Deleted’ (www.wired.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Exposes the "myth" of deleted I think is a bit much. They described it very well a good ways down:

One framework for thinking about the deletion of photos in the year 2024 is that it really has different levels. In Google’s documentation for its cloud services, for example, the company details its stages of deletion—the soft deletion, the logical deletion, the eventual expiration. The company says that in all cloud products, copies of deleted data are marked as available storage and overwritten over time. Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”

If your phone deletes a photo, say as a background process (after being in the trash for 30 days) and a bug prevents that space from eventually getting reclaimed, that data would persist even though it's "inaccessible". Fixing something else, may have made that data accessible again causing the issue people were seeing. Good to see they got it resolved though

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”

This is how delete works on all disks and filesystems, SSD too. It just is marked as free in the fs tree. "Real" delete is called secure delete and is slow.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Rewriting bits to 1s or 0s is very slow especially in mechanical drives and is hard on equipment. Even SSDs have a rated max writes, if we rewrite all data every delete it will decrease the lifespan of hardware.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

This is why is assumed they mark them to overwrite. Google knows a lot about what makes drives last longer, and OS and drive firmware makers have known for decades too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Every so often I scrub the free space of my drives to make sure I'm not retaining exploitable garbage data. Easier to do that once every week or so than to secure delete every file.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

dinosaur disk drive

Ouch

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

Always SDelete in Windows and scrub in Linux