iPhone: the new iOS 17.5 update resurrects the dead

An issue that appears to be affecting many people has been discoveredin iOS 17.5. According to the testimonies that we can read on the internet,old photos appeared in the photo libraryfrom the iPhone of several users, after having been deleted, sometimes for several years.

This phenomenon quickly caused some Internet users to rise in the towers, while creating a wave of generalized paranoia. They feel fooled by Apple, and some are convinced that the Apple company keeps a copy of all of their photos via iCloud, or even other data.

Apple has not yet provided any explanations on this subject, but it is likely that it isactually a bug related to writing data to the local memory of the iPhone.

A local problem, rather than on the Cloud

Contrary to what many people say, the anomaly could be more linked to a memory management problem on the iPhone, rather than on iCloud. Indeed, we can read multiple stories of people who saw old photos appear that they had initially deleted, butat the time they deleted them, iCloud was not activated on their iPhone.

The userRedditTraviscat was touched by the inconvenience, and shares his experience:

It's strange, it happened to me. I only activated iCloud Photos in 2023 and this morning I found 5 photos from May 2022 in my photo album on my iPad (the photos were taken on my iPhone). They were deleted from my phone maybe 2 weeks after being taken (and transferred to an external hard drive).

A file is rarely permanently deleted

For those who didn't know, it israre for data to be completely deleted from a device. As proof, there are numerous file recovery procedures, although it is true that since the democratization of SSD and NAND flash memory, they have become more complicated.

Regardless, once deleted, files continue to exist in a device's memory, but they are no longer indexed. The operating system will therefore simply ignore them, butit is possible that a bug reindexes them. We imagine that this is what happened in iOS 17.5.

In order to avoid this kind of inconvenience, some people use permanent removal tools. They allow random data to be written to the space that the file occupied, making its recovery practically impossible.

The hypothesis put forward here concerning the nature of the iOS 17.5 anomaly is, as a reminder, purely speculative, because it could in reality be something else. We'll know more when Apple speaks. Waiting for,you can review what's new in iOS 17.5.