[steve_avery]

After the CSAM scanning debacle came out this year, it pushed me towards being far less reliant on any cloud servers and I set up a home NAS, transferred my photos to it, deleted everything off of my iCloud, and discontinued my subscription to iCloud for higher storage, going down to the free 5gb tier.

Ever since then, I've been getting notifications on the settings app about how my iCloud storage is almost out of space because somehow my iPhone backup takes nearly 4.8gb, even though I have disabled the vast majority of app backup permissions.

If you dismiss the almost out of storage notification and the accompanying ad for subscription to iCloud, it comes back a month later.

I feel this author's pain.

Another fishy thing that Apple does is that when I bought this phone, they gave a free year of Apple TV+. Most of my paid subscriptions I keep a close eye on and cancel right after I sign up, so that I won't have to remember at the end of the subscription period. It works fine with any app on the app store, I get the service for the desired period. With Apple TV +, if you cancel your subscription to avoid autorenew, it immediately cancels your access to the service.

Rules for thee, not for me.

[busymom0]

> Rules for thee, not for me.

As an iOS developer, this is very true indeed. Apple specifically bars developers from using push notifications for ad purposes yet Apple itself does it to push their own Apple Music ads as the article shows.

The CSAM stuff also made me decide to never buy a brand new apple product again and I will basically buy used devices for my development work so less of my money is going towards them. I also got myself an Android phone and a windows Dell laptop recently which I will be putting linux on for non-work purposes.

[Bobylonian]

I decided to get a bit further and get Sailfish(main reason was because of somewhat closest Nokia succession - the other choices were Pure OS, Ubuntu) compatible phone, because Android Google Play has the same draconic % as Apple store. Though, to be fair there is still a possibility to install apps without using Google Play, but I am not happy, that there are some apps I do not use and they stay in memory and can't be removed permanently.

Also, seems that Windows 10 will go bye bye in 2022 as well and have to decide on which Linux(mandrake seems more user friedly than plain Arch), because W10 disrupts my order of things by consistently rebooting(probably for some small updates) or updating machine during the night, when instead of open apps as I have left them, I have clean log in screen in the morning. Ah, and not going to W11 - not only because of spying, but because I do not wish to spend money for new hardware specifically to Windows, if my old hardware has not been maxed out - in regards to memory.

[hvgk]

Go to settings -> iCloud -> storage -> manage storage -> backups.

You can delete the old backups there. It does keep backups of old devices for some reason.

I tend to use this feature though as intended. I dropped my XR off down the front of Stanage Edge. When recovered it was badly damaged. Following Monday in an apple store I recovered the backup onto a new 12 and it was exactly as I’d left the XR configuration wise. Saved me hours of futzing.

[wrycoder]

At least it was just the XR!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanage_Edge

[hvgk]

That’s the one!

The XR did manage to upload all the photos to iCloud when we got in range of a cell tower. Also the rear glass didn’t break, only the screen. Apple replaced the screen under AppleCare and my daughter still has the phone.

[kingcharles]

LOL. My brother dropped his off the top of The Big One.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_One_(roller_coaster)

[hvgk]

Oops! I nearly lost my lunch on that one :)

[j1elo]

Some friends have set a NAS up, and I'm doing the same, but most people seem to replace the cloud with a NAS while ignoring a crucial point that cloud providers do for you: replication. Are you handling that in yours?

It's an upcoming disaster waiting to occur, having their own private NAS but not backing it up somewhere else, only relying on the RAID reconstruction abilities of whatever they bought (and that's for those who bought the much more expensive units with 2 or 3 disk bays... don't get me started with those cheaper single-disk Synology ones)

[criddell]

How well do the NAS-based programs work for search? Can you search for photos with dogs, for example?

[thathndude]

The short answer for me is “no.” And that’s why I just can’t bring myself to sever the cord (and never will). I just don’t trust myself (and only myself) with a lifetime of photos of the kids.

[mishafb]

You could encrypt and archive everything and back that up periodically with rclone, or get external hard drives with a copy and store them separately

[j1elo]

Yes, that's exactly my idea. I recently purchased a pCloud storage offer for Black Friday, and will use rclone to make full copies of the NAS itself. The good thing of doing that, is that the storage provider doesn't ultimately matter, if you want to change providers it's just a matter of uploading a new copy.

[ender341341]

> Ever since then, I've been getting notifications on the settings app about how my iCloud storage is almost out of space because somehow my iPhone backup takes nearly 4.8gb, even though I have disabled the vast majority of app backup permissions.

iCloud backup does a really bad job of reclaiming space, back when I was on the free tier every once in a while I'd clear the backup (I think by disabling it?) and then re-doing the backup.

[latexr]

> With Apple TV +, if you cancel your subscription to avoid autorenew, it immediately cancels your access to the service.

My understanding is that if you cancel the trial you lose immediate access. But if you were paying for it and canceled, you’d retain access to the end of your billing period.

[blorgle]

This issue with the backups happened to me as well. I managed to solve it by disabling iCloud Backup which deletes all the backups, then re-enabling it. I think essentially what happens is some stuff gets backed up, and even if you delete that stuff from your phone it's still retained in backups for some period of time.

[amelius]

Dark patterns.

An unfortunate side effect of the free market.