As I mentioned in a previous article, I am currently in the process of organizing my photos.
It's the tedious work of extracting data from the Mac Photos app and storing it in a large-capacity HDD under a Photos/YYYY/MM structure.
I've run my custom script multiple times to process the data from several Photos apps, and I'm finally about 80% done.
The size is already around 1.5TB, but since the HDD still has plenty of space, I was planning to process the rest in the same way. That's when it happened.
I received a notification from "pCloud," an online storage service that had absolutely nothing to do with this task, saying that my storage limit had been reached.
When it comes to pCloud notifications, they often pop up like semi-malicious ads during events like the Lunar New Year. So, at first, I didn't completely trust it this time either.
Besides, according to how I use it, I should still have plenty of space.
In the first place, the only things I was syncing to pCloud were iPhone photo data and documents on my Mac. At most, it was about 500GB.
I had already purchased a 2TB lifetime plan, so I should have had more than enough room. Yet, the display on the management screen showed that the 2TB was completely used up.
Thinking something was wrong, I decided to look into it a little.
It turned out that "Photos" in pCloud's automatic sync settings was somehow set to Active.
I might have set it myself a long time ago, but honestly, I don't really remember. For the time being, I changed it to Inactive.
However, the storage situation didn't change at all.
When I investigated the folder contents further, an unbelievable truth came to light.
For some reason, the Photos data from the "external HDD" I am currently organizing had been synced entirely to the Photos directory under pCloudBackup.
This was the cause that had gobbled up my storage in an instant.
It truly makes no sense.
I was under the impression that it was configured to link the Photos folder directly under the Mac user directory, but somehow the data from the external HDD had been sucked up.
I never explicitly targeted anything under /Volumes for syncing, so why would it be picked up automatically?
The cause remains a mystery, but I figured it was because the folder on the external HDD was named "Photos."
Just in case, I changed the directory name on the external HDD from Photos to MyPhotos, and now I am doing the utterly useless work of deleting the massive amount of Photos data that got mistakenly uploaded to pCloud.
Occasionally, I encounter this kind of "inexplicable spec behavior."
That's exactly why I think it's better to be overly cautious when using convenient tools like online storage.
Suddenly, a memory from my past work duties came back to me.
When I was working as an engineer logging into production servers, I used to be incredibly careful about whether I was currently "in a directory on the NAS" or "in a local directory."
Because if you accidentally deleted data on the NAS, unmounted it, or blew away a symbolic link, it would turn into a situation that was no joke.
This time, it's just a story about personal photo data, so it's not a fatal incident.
Still, it made me realize once again that I cannot place absolute trust in convenient online tools whose specifications are completely black-boxed.
📅