S3Drive - How does S3Drive Handle Duplicate Photo Names in Backups?

After backing up my photos using the S3Drive app, I attempted to delete them from my iPhone. I noticed that the files remained in my S3 bucket, which is great. However, I'm curious about what will happen if I reached that photo incremental with the same name, like 'IMG_555.heic.' Will it replace the existing 'IMG_555.heic' in S3? Keep in mind that this refers to a different photo, one that is older or newer but has the same name, inshort different MD5 sum.

Hi, these numbers are directly related iOS local internal identifiers: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/phasset/1624732-fetchassets That is, different photo on a same device is guaranteed to have a different identifier, unless you erase your device and start over again. There is some unconfirmed comment that these identifiers has changed in the history after updating the iOS version: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40094728/phobject-localidentifier-reliability/46819559#46819559 Which I can't confirm or refute. In which case it's better to play safe and always enable the: "Versioning" on your S3 bucket (or what endpoint you use?), so if this ever happened you could always restore your photos. There are also more complex scenarios, like same photo on a different iOS device (e.g. if you've synced your media between the devices using iCloud). Currently with our local ID approach these photos would be uploaded from one and the other device, receiving different IDs, but there wouldn't be a risk of collision because different device use different upload prefix (configurable from the settings), so unless you use two same iOS models you would be fine. We'll be further improving this in the future by using the: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/phphotolibrary/2909179-cloudidentifiers ... or given our cross-platform needs, we will handle hashes ourselves, so we have one truly working approach for photo deduplication that works across all platforms not just iOS. I hope this answer your question. Stay backed up and encrypted !

Thanks Tom for this great insight you've given, will read more about it.