macOS stores a copy of everything one prints forever
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- Опубликовано: 29 окт 2022
- In this episode, we explore how macOS stores a copy of everything one prints forever.
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LINKS
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How to disable CUPS printer job history on macOS 👉 github.com/sunknudsen/privacy...
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Just one random comment. Make sure to print the paper backups with laser printers not ink printers, even if you are going to laminate it, humidity will build up inside the plastic and mess with your backups.
macOS user: Why is my device storage full for no reason?
So do most commercial copier-printers. If you make copies at staples etc., a copy is kept, usually on a SATA drive.
Don't forget about that file thumbnail, depending on the OS it may be kept forever or until disk space is needed. Also plenty of PDF viewers will also keep a pre-rendered 'temp' cache of files and embedded images/fonts you've opened or even just navigated to a folder containing it. Some modern PDF viewers and OSes will even upload hashes of files to 'the cloud' or even in some cases the entire file even without you explicitly requesting it often without ever telling you it happened, this happens on cloud connected services like photo viewers with feature recognition as well as virus scanners.
All you have to do is run the following from terminal to have it flush these files every day. You can also set them to "no" so that they are never saved, or a different timeout value. "cupsctl PreserveJobFiles=86400 PreserveJobHistory=86400". IMO this is a much better solution than what's described in the video. Also, running "cancel -a -x" will purge the currently saved print jobs.
Like others pointed out, this is likely
Looks like a general feature of CUPS, which also stores on Linux unless if you specifically tell it not to.
This is just a standard feature of cups. It’s something that happens on linux or any Unix machine that uses cups. Though cups is by apple it’s made for unix in general not macos. I have a print server running cups that I use to wifi enable a few old printers and I’m able to see prints going back years through the web panel.
Thanks for posting this, I was unaware. I have made our security forum at work also aware since we have a large deployment of MacOS.
great to see you making videos on RUclips again!
As a MDM administrator this does not directly impact me, at least not yet. However, this is something I absolutely plan on looking in to remediating. This was a very good and incredibly informative video.
An article was written about this very same point in March 2007, 15 years ago, in Mac OS X Hints. It is nothing new about macOS or Apple or CUPS.
wow this is wild. Thanks for the heads up. Have a great day!
Hi Sun, welcome back! Do you think we should update to iOS16 for privacy and security standpoint? Can you create a content for that?
I can confirm that I have files as old as my computer in there. This is pretty bad. Thanks for sharing!
I think he's mistaken about the timeframe, or it is the case that my macOS Monterey computer is not holding the files of everything I've ever printed. It looks like there some automatic cups server flushing out files older than 60 days. I have certainly printed out files in the winter, spring, and summer of 2022, and these files are not present in /var/spool/cups as of 03 November 2022.
Hey Sun, Thank you for the video. I was trying to recover a file on my mac that i do see in the completed Print Jobs list. I tried the method you showed on ventura 13.5.1 but not get it to the desktop. My 2 questions: did they patch this in the new version? Does it maybe not work of the original file was deleted? Would be great to recover this file..!
Will have to check for windows too and this made me think why they cache it .Btw thanks for the informative video
Superbacked 😮🎉
Im curious if this is also true for scanning from a printer. would a copy of what you scanned be saved in this directory as well? Or would it be a different directory and different job history setting?