
Tell HN: iBooks has deleted all my downloaded books - rayalez
So apparently when your iPad is getting low on space, it just deletes all the books from your iBooks library. Without asking for permission or notifying you in any way. It &quot;offloads&quot; them to the iCloud, so you have to re-download them manually.<p>Which is a very unpleasant thing to find out after you went on a summer vacation to the area without the internet, hoping to plug off, having downloaded a bunch of books you were hoping to read.<p>This is the most infuriating moment of using a piece of technology I&#x27;ve ever had.<p>I&#x27;m posting this here on the off chance that someone from Apple reads this, since that happens with threads on HN sometimes.
======
gingerlime
Slightly misleading title. My personal anecdote:

We’re about to board a long haul flight and our son was too eager to download
Netflix kids programs so that space ran out. Apple has a default policy of
offloading unused apps to conserve space. Unfortunately it offloaded the
Netflix app itself :-/

------
niklasd
I really struggled with the iCloud feature that automatically uploads stuff to
save space. I was running low on disk space and iCloud just constantly auto-
uploaded files and deleted them locally. While this – in theory – might sound
like a good idead, there where three issues that turned this into an
nightmare:

\- I could not tell iCloud which files i needed locally, or configure it in
any way

\- iCloud constantly uploaded files that I recently used and needed

\- Sometimes it took very long to get them back

E.g. I would have a python script with a venv and because some files would not
be there locally, the excecution failed. And even though I had internet
access, I could keep clicking on the cloud-icon to fetch the file, and nothing
happend... It was nightmarish. No I'm trying to quit iCloud, but I first have
to understand how to get all my files back and what will get deleted when I
quit. Not too easy...

~~~
duxup
Yeah for me iCloud pretty much will fill itself up almost immediately if I let
it.

Solution....I just turn it off...

The problem with auto cloud backup is that short of just taking photos....
even somewhat casual users will fill their quota infinitely.

~~~
basch
are you saying with or without paying the $1/m?

------
nell
Misleading title. It’s not an unrecoverable delete. It’s moved into iCloud as
you had specified.

You can even turn off iBooks from using iCloud in Settings.

~~~
bmitc
If they do not have access to the Internet on their iPad while on their remote
vacation, it is an unrecoverable delete, at least temporarily.

Your second suggestion seems like it is blaming the user. How does the user
know this is the action Apple will take upon low disk space? Isn't the sane
thing that downloads are left alone, whether or not cloud backup is turned on?

~~~
stepstop
> it is an unrecoverable delete, at least temporarily.

That’s not really a precise phrase. It’s recoverable, but with a delayed
outage (denial of service).

------
perryizgr8
It's funny that Apple thinks deleting books can be a good way to recover
memory. Books are usually all under 1MB in my experience. Tablets now have a
minimum of 256GB and most of them also accept SD cards of similar capacities.
No need to delete 1MB books!

~~~
bmitc
Both iPad Pro models, $800 and $1,000 respectively, start at 128GB. And iPads
do not accept SD cards.

~~~
Havoc
Yeah they should really do something about that

------
arthurcolle
Sorry to hear that! If only there was a way to download media that you could
then save/duplicate across many devices without needing to pay rent every-time
you want to acquire it.

Hopefully some industrious programmer eventually figures that out, it would be
really useful. The genesis of such a library would be so useful. Too bad it
would be really hard to keep the pirates at bay!

~~~
rovr138
Did you read the issue?

Device was low on memory. Books where saved on iCloud. The devices offloaded
the books to make space.

How does downloading them through other means help?

------
SenHeng
I’m curious what people here think would be the better solution here and why?

1\. Delete the books anyway but notify 2\. Don’t delete the books/apps, notify
user that memory is running out

~~~
RandomBacon
3\. Notify the user and ask what the user wants to be moved to iCloud to free
up space on the device.

~~~
occamrazor
I think one can choose per app wether to use icloud sync and backup (but not
within the app which individual files to keep on the phone). For Files one can
also explicitly tell to save them locally (but then they are not duplicated in
iCloud.

------
simonblack
The reason I hate using Apple and Windows stuff is that the system seems to
think it knows better than you. This is a philosophical thing, not a
technology thing.

The SYSTEM decides what's offloaded to the iCloud. The SYSTEM decides that you
can't start up your Windows machine to print that report that's due in 10
minutes, because it just absolutely _must_ spend 40 minutes completing its
updates before it will let you do anything with the computer.

How hard is it to have a list of things to be offloaded, downloaded, updated,
or whatever? Then the _USER_ gets to select what happens with what, rather
than the _SYSTEM_ deciding, and often wrongly.

~~~
idoh
In this case it is a setting and you can turn it off.

------
plake
I’ve seen this happen frequently in both iBooks and Apple Music, which is why
I refuse to use either. I always assumed it was a DRM thing? Kindle doesn’t do
this at all, and while Spotify does, it’s much rarer, and always waits until
you have connectivity, so it can immediately re-download.

It’s such an obvious deal-breaker, I don’t understand how “let’s delete your
stuff all the time, even in offline mode” made it through testing.

------
andor
I've had something similar happen with Spotify. Sometimes it (used to?)
invalidates downloaded content, probably to refresh the DRM.

I was at the airport for an intercontinental flight and wanted to quickly
download another album, so I disabled Spotify's offline mode. At that point it
started re-downloading everything over airport Wifi. Needless to say I was not
amused.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
There’s other things Apple’s doing that are even worse imo. I didn’t realize
until yesterday that if you receive a phone call on your iPhone (on the
number) that if you’ve used your Apple ID on an iPad (used by family members)
it also receives the call and can be answered via FaceTime, I kind of
considered that a massive invasion of privacy but after searching around
online seems no ones bothered by it. I have now turned that “feature” off. I
had already been careful to turn off syncing that takes place all over the
place too on these devices. iCloud and the like shouldn’t be turned on by
default and I had no idea about the call option, it didn’t occur to me a phone
call to my phone number could be received by someone else using a shared iPad.
The problem is someone has to sign into these shared devices that family/kids
sometimes use in order to download apps. It should really be limited to the
store though. Now I’ve tried signing in just for the purpose of purchasing and
we’ll see if that works, I _think_ the iCloud/call features are off now.

~~~
nojito
How is that a privacy issue?

You logged in with your personal Apple ID and stayed logged in.

Just use the family option for getting apps on kids/family members devices.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
You have to stay logged in for the App Store, or you need to login each time.
The point is I only want to be logged in for one purpose (the store), I don’t
need all devices I’m logged into be syncing and taking my calls. I understand
now this behavior can be changed but I had no idea this was even a feature. My
stance is that this should not be the default setting the same as the thread
creator doesn’t appreciate books offloading to iCloud by default to be a
helpful feature. It’s the default option of these types of things that can
inadvertently lead to privacy issues or issues where data you expected to be
there when you need it not being there.

~~~
andor
If your family uses your iPad, you can create a new Apple ID and then use the
"Family Sharing" feature to get access to apps bought with your main account.

~~~
Jtsummers
This is what my wife and I do, and will do for our kids when they're old
enough to have a device like that. One purchase, shared by the household. Much
simpler than manually logging in or having your credentials used by others.

------
vimy
Even with enough space on my iPhone iBooks keeps deleting books. Every time I
open the app I have to redownload all my books.

------
rootsudo
This happened to me too and it sucked, especially if you run out/don't use
icloud storage. :(

