{"id":38812,"date":"2023-03-20T15:07:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T19:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=38812"},"modified":"2023-04-03T11:21:22","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T15:21:22","slug":"photos-data-loss-with-macos-13-3-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/20\/photos-data-loss-with-macos-13-3-beta\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos Data Loss With macOS 13.3 Beta"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Hill<\/a> (via Marquelle D. McKean<\/a>):<\/p>\n

During a Europe trip in May 2022, I uploaded over 6,000 photos and hundreds of videos to the cloud. Upon editing and deleting some of the photos, I encountered an issue with Photos.app, which ultimately led to the complete wiping out of my entire cloud library. Despite my efforts to recover the lost data using tools such as Disk Drill and contacting Apple support, no useful recoverable files could be found. Unfortunately, Apple support refused to escalate the issue to the engineering team due to the use of a beta version of macOS Ventura.<\/p>

The loss of my lifetime memories and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of intellectual property is one of the most devastating experiences of my life. I believe it is crucial to highlight the importance of backing up all data, including cloud content, to prevent such a catastrophic loss.<\/p>

As a result of this incident, Koingo Software is investing 100% of our resources into finding a solution; all standard business operations have been halted for the time being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Cloud syncing is not a backup. Apple doesn’t provide a way to directly download a backup of your photos, so you need to have Photos set to Download Originals to this Mac<\/strong>, which for most people means that they need to fit on your internal SSD. Then you can back them up yourself with Time Machine or to another cloud provider.<\/p>\n\n

The other issue here is using your real data with a beta OS version. It’s easy to say that one shouldn’t do that, and I try not to. But I can’t really blame a developer for doing so because we want to identify bugs before<\/em> they hit our customers, and many bugs don’t show up when using a clean test system. There’s no way to, say, use different Apple IDs for calendars and photos. And it’s not as though release versions are free of data loss bugs, either. So I think the main problem was not realizing that his local backup needed to include the photo library.<\/p>\n\n

Marquelle D. McKean<\/a>:<\/p>\n

By all reasonable standards, this is a person we would expect to have understanding of how these things work. You don’t become the CEO of a small software company that’s been in business for nearly 30 years by being ignorant about computers. (Okay, maybe some people do, but they generally don’t stay in business for long after that.)<\/p>\n

If someone like Josh can get something so straightforward and fundamental so very wrong, is it any wonder “ordinary” users make the same mistake, over and over again?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n