iPhone Thieves Locking Users Out of Their Apple Accounts

icloud photos downloader (https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader) can be used to automatically download/backup photos on a periodic basis. Supports 2FA.

@Yan How does that work? Is it scraping the icloud.com Web site?

I use https://www.photoprism.app/ in combination with https://www.photosync-app.com/ to automatically backup photos from my phone to my Linux home server, and it works pretty well.

@Geoff Is that really automatic or do you have to remember to launch the app now and then so it can continue to get background time?

Years ago, I was using Microsoft's OneDrive app. It automatically uploads your photos to your OneDrive account based on a frequency you set or with every photo taken. Now I manually save photos I want to keep to an external HD.

I use Dropbox to have a cloud backup of my photos, and Synology Photos to have a local backup.

> But this is not because Apple can’t restore access. It’s just their policy not to support other forms of recovery identification: driver’s license, backup e-mail, postal mail, physically appearing at an Apple Store, etc.

That's not true, given what the article stated.

> They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

That is correct, at least based on Apple's documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208072

> Creating a recovery key turns off account recovery. Account recovery is a process that would otherwise help you get back into your Apple ID account when you don’t have enough information to reset your password.

> Using a recovery key is more secure, but it means that you’re responsible for maintaining access to your trusted devices and your recovery key. If you lose both of these items, you could be locked out of your account permanently.

Because the attackers set a recovery key on the victim's account, there is nothing Apple can do (at least based on what it's said publicly) to help the victim recover their account. If the attackers hadn't set a recovery key, I think it's a different story. Though I also expect they'd fall back to other published account recovery paths which, as you note, don't allow for recovery via physical ID: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204921

@Plume Using a Mac?

@Rando The Apple support page agrees with what you say, that there’s nothing you can do if a recovery key has been set, though I note that the “could” is not definitive. However, the article says the opposite. Near the beginning it says that there is “virtually no way back into their accounts without that recovery key.” Then it says: “those locked out of their Apple accounts by thieves using the recovery key face a bigger challenge: finding a way through Apple’s complex policies and bureaucracy to retrieve their lost photos, contacts, notes, messages and other files,” which implies that there is a way. And then there’s the example that I mentioned in the post of Terry Allen. What I take from this is that the Apple page is saying that there’s no automated way to do recovery without the key but that if you talk to a human they have the ability to disable the recovery key. It would be interesting to know whether this is still possible with Advanced Data Protection enabled (if you get the device back).

Amazon Photos is unlimited for Amazon Prime members, and the app works really well at automatically uploading all of your photos. You only get 5GB of space for videos,but $20/year for 100GB is pretty reasonable.

I then download my Amazon Photos library, giving me another backup.

Having decided not to use services available only in the Apple ecosystem in Aug 2021 (and turning off iCloud Photo Library), I have been happy with https://ente.io/ (used in my iPhone, iPad and a Linux laptop).

I have not used the Background Uploads feature, so can't speak to that. I have the app in my Linux laptop sync/export all photos and backup to the cloud (using rclone).

> Using a Mac?

Dropbox does photo uploads on Macs, afaik. Synology Photos itself doesn't automatically upload photos from Macs yet, but you can set up something yourself using tools like Hazel.

@Plume My original point was that backup is trickier with non-Mac platforms because there is no equivalent of the Photos app. You responded that you use Dropbox and Synology. So I was wondering whether you meant on a Mac or whether you had found an automatic (not having to import from the phone) way to do it with Windows.

No, I wasn't talking about the Mac, I was talking about mobile platforms. There are a lot of mobile apps that auto-backup photos. Synology Photos does backups to a DiskStation, so there isn't even any cloud involved.

@Plume That gets back to what I was saying earlier about iOS background time.

I haven't tested these apps on iOS. They claim to backup automatically; Synology sends background notification to its iOS app to wake it up, but I'm not sure how well this works. I only use it on Android, where it works perfectly.

@Plume Maybe Synology is better, but my experience is that even with background notifications you can’t really depend on an iOS app to keep getting background time over the long term unless you manually launch it now and then.

@MichaelTsai I use PhotoSync (iOS app) to upload new photos to Dropbox. It has an Auto Transfer feature if you allow Background App Refresh, with triggers for geofence and a specific time if the phone is charging.