Photos.app flailing during sync with iCloud Photo Library? Maybe it's a permissions problem.

My daughter uses Photos.app and a 50 GB iCloud Photo Library to manage her videos and images [1]. She edits on an older Air with a small SSD, in that environment Photos.app caches scaled res images and only downloads full res when editing.

In addition I run an instance of Photos.app for her that stores full res images. The Photos.app Library is stored on an external SSD that hangs off an Elgato T2 Hub attached to my beloved Air. The hub has been very reliable under El Cap and Sierra.

I have a user account for her on my drive, and in that account the external library is the Photos.app System Library. My Time Machine [3] and Carbon Copy [4] backups include that Library.

All was well under El Capitan. A few months ago I upgraded to Sierra [2]. Yesterday I decided to update her Photos.app library — only to discover I was a few months behind [5]. Her user account hadn’t been updated to Sierra; when I opened Photos.app her Library had to be updated.

Things did not go well. Photos.app said it was uploading @8,000 images (really it shouldn’t have uploaded anything, but Photos.app sucks), then @2,000, then @11, then … You get the idea. It did that when I went to bed, and it was doing it in the morning.

After a bit of playing around I discovered that a Sierra bug meant that she no longer had write permissions to the external SSD, even though macOS said she did. I switched to an admin account and there she had no permissions, so I added her. After that she could write to the SSD. Photos.app “stuck upload” was because it had no write permissions at all.

I decided to create a fresh Photos.app Library for her. To do that I turned off WiFi and did option-Photos.app startup to create a new Library. I copied the old Library to an external drive and deleted it. I then opened the new Library, made it the System Library (interestingly it showed images from a cache!), turned on WiFi and enabled iCloud Photo Library. The images then downloaded from iCloud (source of truth) and restored my local backup copy.

- fn -

[1] She is chronically running against the limit — which isn’t all bad. It enforces some editing. I might switch to sharing a 200GB plan, but I’m not sure how that will work with our current family use of a single iTunes password. Future experiment needed.

[2] I like to wait at least 8 months before accepting Apple’s dangerously buggy macOS updates.

[3] Our two Airs do Time Machine backups up to a Synology NAS. After some initial issues that has been utterly trouble-free. The NAS has two RAID 1 drives, if one fails the other survives. This is another reason I wait for macOS bugs to get fixed; I also need things like VMs and NAS to be updated.

[4] CCC backups to a 4TB low heat drive in a Voyager cradle with Firewire 800 connection to the Elgato hub. I rotate 4 drives. Rotation is every 2-3 weeks, 1 drive is across town, the other in my Van. A Yellowstone eruption would take them all out unless the van outran the pyroclastic flow. It is a shame that offsite internet backup has failed.

[5] Only automated backup ever works — and no form of backup is reliable.

Mobile device management and Apple Classroom for home

Contrary to Ziff-Davis (ok, it was 2013) there are several vendors who provide MDM solutions for home use. MMGuardian and Qustudio are two of them.

I wonder though if it’s possible to cobble something together at home that would work with Apple Classroom. OS X server ($20) includes Profile Manager, Apple’s MDM manager (support). Joshua Jung has written a nice tutorial on getting Profile Manger working. In theory Apple Classroom should be able to work with this …

Anyone try it?

Quicken for Mac moved our financial data to their servers and we can't remove it

From Quicken.com support:

What is the Quicken Cloud?

 …The Quicken Cloud data cannot be deleted, although there may be an option to delete it in the near future.

Quicken Cloud is used to sync data for mobile devices. We don’t use Quicken mobile, we only use Quicken for Mac. We did not enable Quicken Cloud sync, we were careful not to enable it.

It appears an update turned it on. Our financial data is now on Quicken’s servers. The servers of a company that clearly has its head deeply buried in an orifice. I’m sure they’re just great at net security.

Anyone know of any good lawsuits against Quicken.com we can support?

Update 10/29/2017

Via Twitter: FAQ: How to remove cloud data in Quicken Mac 2017 4.6.x. I followed the directions. As best I can tell data can flow from most of our transaction partners either directly or via the Quicken cloud. When this procedure is applied transactions revert to Direct where possible. Some don’t work Direct, they stay in the Cloud.

Life with Apple: Podcasts move to streaming only

In a move that feels as inevitable as death and taxes, Apple has made podcasts effectively streaming only. The same thing is likely to happen to all media, Podcasts just went first.

Until recently macOS iTunes and iOS Podcasts.app supported both file based sync, including Playlists, and streaming based distribution with an unreliable sync of podcast metadata.

With iOS 11 iTunes playlists are no longer represented in Podcasts.app. You can still create Playlists in iTunes made up of local files and/or cloud references, but they stay in iTunes. The Playlists were the main way I organized listening to my large collection of file-based In Our Time podcasts and my medical education podcasts. No more. I’m now dependent on the very limited (ok, crap) organization abilities of Podcasts.app.

Apple has long had problems with video that moved to an iPhone from both iCloud and iTunes. iBooks synchronization is a mess too if you mix non-Apple store ePub with streamed iBook.

This is ugly and going to get worse. We’re moving fast into the DRMd hard data-lock rental-only future.

Update: Many good threads on this in Apple Communities. They reminded me to leave feedback. Stations are not a substitute for playlist sync, but even on their own they are missing a key filter — limit to on-device items.

Photos.app is as stupid about JPEG Export as iPhoto and Aperture.

Try this experiment.

1. Import a camera produced JPEG into Photos.app. Check the size. Let’s say it’s 6.8MB.

2. Don’t edit the image. Export it as maximum quality JPEG. Check the size. It will be something like 17.2MB.

Even though the image was native JPEG, and it wasn’t edited, Photos.app decompressed and then recompressed it. Adding 11MB of non-value.

Unchanged from iPhoto and, for that matter, Aperture.

There should be a better way. (No, unmodified original is not a better way — because if editing were done, or the original were not JPEG, then you would want the transformation.)

Annals of iOS inconsistency: Contacts vs Notes vs Reminders - backup and sharing

https://www.icloud.com/#settings currently shows an “Advanced” subsection for restoring Contacts. It provides options to restore an iCloud data set “archive” from iCloud (not to be confused with restoring an entire iOS device backup):

Notes aren’t on the list though. They have their own note-specific backup restore option, but it’s at the level of an individual note and there’s no version restore, only the ability to undo a delete for 30 days by restoring a Note from “recently deleted”. (BTW, if you Share a Note only the Owner can “delete” — but anyone with Edit privileges can remove all content — and since there’s no version undo that means anyone who can edit a Note can delete it without a recovery option.)

Sharing is another area of odd inconsistency. Notes must be shared one at time, but multiple Reminders can belong to a set of People.

I’d like to see Notes add Google-style Note-specific version save/restore and share by container (folder) as well as Note, but there’s no rumor of that in iOS 11. I’d pay for a third party solution for iCloud, similar to what CloudPull does for Google App docs, but I fear the demand is too small (for example). An Apple iCloud Drive folder view of Notes [1] would be a big help; I’d then be able to restore an individual Note from a Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backup …

Anyone have an AppleScript to create a local daily snapshot of Notes? (There is this, but in Sierra Apple omitted AppleScript dictionary support for PDF creation).

The world moves in unexpected ways. We seem to be converging on a form of backup that’s a regression for people like me, but a big improvement for most. There’s probably some kind of futurist principle there — the good-enough mass solution will drive out the elite ideal …

- fn -

[1] The main reason I’m still on Simplenote is that nvAlt on my Mac maintains a synchronized file store that works just like this. Perfect data freedom — but almost nobody appreciates this …

[2] As of Sierra at least some parts of Notes are in /Users/[username]/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes. This location has changed a few times. Note content is distributed between media files (PDF, etc) and text in a sqlite database, so recreating an individual Note document as, say, an RTF file, is a non-trivial task. For example (sqlite browser):

I suppose Time Machine backups of this folder might be a kind of ‘restore all notes’ option, but restoring a version of an individual Note would be tricky…. (There’s something deep here about the ways in which we assemble bits to create something our brains perceive and our tools manipulate, but it’s beyond my ken. Once upon a time a BYTE article would have traced the roots of the Notes sqlite store back to database file systems of the 1980s…)

Facebook won't let you use the email '+' extension as a new email address

Gmail, and some other systems, support a very old email standard that needs a name. Gmail will treat myname+123@gmail.com as though it were myname@gmail.com. It’s handy for filtering email lists.

I wondered if it could use it with Facebook accounts.  As I discuss in my book there are many reasons to have Facebook related email for a vulnerable user go to their parent or “Guide”. Facebook doesn’t allow an email address to be associated with more than one account — maybe the + feature would work …

Except it doesn’t. I tried adding a + variant of my personal email to one of the kids accounts and Facebook told me it was in use.

Bummer. Now you know not to try.

Incidentally, iCloud support up to 3 aliases, so you can do this with an iCloud email alias. Alas, regular Gmail does not support true aliases — only the + suffix trick. Google Apps does support aliases, at least if you own a domain, but that’s strictly a geek or business thing.