Thread by @interfluidity

Last week I lamented the disappearance of voice memos from my wife's iPhone, somewhere over the course of iOS upgrades + phone transfers via iCloud. @ElcomSoft saw my frustration that most tools were unable to scrounge iOS 14 iCloud backups + took pity. Thank you @ElcomSoft! 1/

The @ElcomSoft "Phone Breaker" application was able to download iCloud backups, including from a phone we lost several months ago, that she stopped actively using in 2017. Thanks to that backup, we were able to recover lost memos from 2012-2017 as plain sound files. 2/

The software is great. "Phone Breaker" sounds so adversarial and hackerish, and I am very grateful for it. I'd recommend it highly. But what's a bit frustrating is that all it did for us are things by rights @apple should allow us to do for ourselves. 3/

We pay expensively every month for the storage we backup to. The data is ours. It is opaquely encoded, but it decodes to an ordinary hierarchical directory structure. (The same is true of iOS backups you make to your own devices.) 4/

I wish @ElcomSoft only the best, but why should users have to pay for not-so-cheap third-party software (expensive in part because @apple apparently plays a cat-and-mouse game of trying to break the software) to have usable access to our own data? 5/

Besides recovering what lost data we could, I'm excited to use @ElcomSoft Phone Breaker to archive our synced data, especially our photographs. 6/

Though we keep one Mac configured to "Download Originals To This Mac", there's no obvious feedback abt how complete this archive Mac's libraries are of the photographs we take from our iPhones. What abt rarely-logged-in users? It's yet another opaque Trust @Apple situation. 7/

We're fucking narcissists with a small kid, but these pictures really matter to us. A convenient way of archiving Our Own Synced Data on media we control doesn't seem like the kind of thing one should have to buy "forensic" software for. 8/

In general, corporations intentionally infantilize users by making data that is "available" difficult or annoying to get. Will your bank let you download statements and other documents as an annual archive, rather than several-clicks-per-document one at a time? 9/

Mine won't. So I make them (and the environment) pay to mail everything. If there's a gap in my download history I can revert to paper or scanned files. That's dumb. 10/

It'd be great if @ElcomSoft provided a tool called "Bank Breaker" we could use to ensure we have complete archives of *our own financial data*. But that, I suspect, would be even more controversial than their current offering. 11/

In any case, I'm really grateful to @ElcomSoft for helping recover some files my wife really cares about. 12/

I'm really angry at @Apple for not making it easy for users to take control of their important data, for encouraging iCloud backups of past-week-only snapshots and a convenience plus "trust-me" attitude despite backup processes that are far from safe or foolproof. 13/

(Shame on me for being an extraordinarily devoted customer of @Apple's I suppose. But while the alternatives offering convenience for technologically not-so-interested family are mostly @google, mb @amazon, and @Microsoft, they're still probably the best of a rough bunch.) 14/

(Note: iCloud backups to not seem to be Time-Machine-style continuous backups. Two snapshots of each device were available. It's only due to the accident of an old phone's old backups lingering that we were able to recover these files. It's a very limited kind of backup!) /fin