@Randoid
15th November 2022
Well, here’s something to make Onedrive members feel better - I have a music creation interest, and it generates quite a bit data in the form of half-Gb GarageBand files. Typical size.
Apple’s marvellous rival to Onedrive is iCloud you probably know. Here’s what makes me think they work from the same hymn sheet these two goliaths…iCloud filled up my PC drive (my expensive, hard-bought 2Tb SSD I fitted to aid my ageing PC).
I don’t mean took 150Gb, I mean FILLED it up. It had half a Tb free to start with, then I syncd to iCloud…which immediately set about copying every file I created, onto the biggest drive it found on my local network, my lovely new SSD drive.
As the free space dwindled to about 100Gb, I realised what was happening - GarageBand files, completely useless beyond doubt on a PC, were being copied incessantly by the iCloud algorithm without mercy. It would have completely choked and finally blocked my machine starting up even, had I not taken drastic action.
Long story short and omitting days of support chats with Apple in California, there’s no fix. Really, no fix whatever. I de-syncd the PC from iCloud. I lost irreplaceable music I created. iCloud, a supposed backup system, acted like a virus would, some viruses actually use the self-same principle of filling up a drive with crud, until the machine simply stops and will NEVER in practice, boot up.
This was because, iCloud at the time had LIMITLESS boundaries, of copying these so-called ‘recently used files for your convenience’ (!).
I am here, because I am looking at Office 365 family, and trying to see what problems there might be. It’s not as bad, unless you guys all caught it before it got worse. But really, GarageBand is famously Mac and iOS/iPadOS only. Apple know a PC can NEVER make use of GB files. Each GB file is really a clutch of files, that make up a GB song. It’s just a shorthand way of referring to this clutch of files. I think there’s 8 and they end in ‘xxx.band’ or something. but a PC could never do anything with such a file.
So I bought iCloud storage, 2Tb of it, and Apple’s idea is to use my own storage. So it’s selling my own space back to me? That’s sort of what happened.
One last ‘it got worse’ moment…I dared to manually copy about 100Gb of files as my ipad was running low on SSD, nearing its max of 512Gb. Apple don’t say, but below 55Gb free space on an iPad Pro, music apps go wrong a lot, especially their baby DAW, GarageBand.
So I cleared this 100Gb off, checked it was on the 2Tb iCloud I pay for every month, then deleted the originals. I also made copies on SD cards, just in case, which was another £70 or so…
I shut the ipad Pro down, and made tea. I returned to check (old IT man’s habit), before I turned in for the night, and the iPad Pro 2 had sprouted a lot of files, and its storage was being taken up. Long story short again, as soon as I de-sync’d my PC, the iCloud algorithm went hunting the next-biggest SSD in my system, and targeted my iPad Pro 2 SSD.
Yes, it began to fill it up remorselessly, just like the PC, to breaking point. It determinedly ‘mirrored’ the self-same files I had just offloaded, straight back on, to where they’d come from.
I termed this, iCloud fighting back. It had an adverse reaction, and took merciless action against the customer daring to use an online drive, in a totally obvious manner - to avoid buying a grand’s worth of new Apple equipment ie replacing my old ipad. iCloud actively prevented me gaining advantage from the 1.4Tb of free space, still available on iCloud.
this is why icloud's so cheap - it fights you to the death if you try to actually use all of it.
Following this fiasco, and me making quite a bit of fuss on youtube and on the apple community, which attracted some nasty trolls/Apple fanboys who took exception to my criticism that iCloud was ‘squatting’ on my SSD space uninvited, Apple have limited the iCloud for now, to ‘only’ take 20% or so of the user’s SSD. It’s still uninvited.
And once it happens, it’s pretty much for life. I cannot seem to get rid of the 100Gb I shoved onto the iCloud, NOR have I really stopped iCloud from shoving a mirror-image onto my SSD. I simply bought an iPad Pro M1 with 2Tb to put the problem into abeyance. so there you go - Apple as a money-making machine works.
One final thought - and the trolls hated this as well - Apple says that the efforts to do what iCloud did, are ‘recent files placed on your local drive for your convenience’ and moreover this work will be done ‘when the user is not needing the device’ or some such, which is to say ‘the device is plugged in (charging) and the screen is off, and activity is low’.
Now, I call that, secretly doing stuff while the user’s not looking. Stuff the user might not like if they realised what was happening.
So not only does iCloud fight back, prepared to break your use of the device it’s meant to be helping you to manage the data of, but it tries hard to do this in secret, a few files at a time. It buries this data it’s pointlessly mirrored back, under ‘iCloud’ in the ‘settings/storage’ facility you can look at…oh hang on, it doesn’t any more, that’s right, Apple changed it so this shoved-back data, forced on the user’s local SSD, is no longer obvious, and sticks it under ‘apps’ heading instead. !!!
So I cannot say I am pleased with what’s happened with iCloud, I don’t like being used as a guinea pig and I don’t like the way youtuber influencers, carefully pick their way around this mess, while extolling the virtues of Apple’s ecosystem.
But, there actually is a dearth of such videos. The few there are, actually skip on to how it’s more convenient or whatever, to have a local portable SSD of your own, that you can save your music and other big files to. I call that, tiptoe-ing around the truth. these guys know full-well what nasty habits icloud gets up to, and if they don’t they ought to.
This is billed as AI, this iCloud. It’s absolutely merciless, is all I know.
So, in conclusion, don’t feel too bad, nobody seems to want to give users a ‘DRIVE D:’ up in the cloud it seems. This business of syncing to local drives, is a cover for offloading your files to your own device space, so the servers of their cloud don’t do all the storage they otherwise would have to.
I am still looking at Onedrive, because it’s a mandatory part of Office 365 Family. I have concerns at not just one but TWO large corporate Clouds, being given licence to lay waste to my SSDs. And Apple’s SSD of course, runs at about 4 to 10x the cost per Gb of any other Gb you can buy (when you spec it to be on the iPad or Mac Mini M1 or whatever, you purchase).
Interesting insights from you people in this discussion, I hope I have helped make it clear, MicroSoft’s One Drive is not exceptionally punitive, it’s just typical !
Take care all.
irm/rg
