iCloud Deleted photos from my PC

A while ago, I had moved over 9,000 photos from my iPhone

to my PC.   I had them saved in a folder on my hard drive on my PC, which has Windows 11.  I had deleted the original pics from my iPhone.

Recently, iCloud showed a warning that I’m running out of space on my iCloud.

I decided to move some videos from my iCloud to my PC to give me more storage on my iCloud.

After I moved those videos, I clicked on the delete button in iCloud.

A box appeared and stated:

Delete (# of items) item from all your devices?

These items will be deleted from iCloud Photos on all your devices

That didn’t bother me since I had already moved the videos to my PC.

It did delete the videos from my iCloud BUT it also deleted the videos from my PC that I had just moved from my iCloud to the PC.

Plus, it deleted all of my 9,000+ photos from my PC!

The videos that I had just deleted were in the “Recently Deleted” folder in my iCloud.  I was able to reverse that deletion and rescue them.

The issue is the 9,000+ photos that were in a separate folder on my PC (not in iCloud or on my iPhone)

Why did it delete all my photos from my PC?

The worst part is that it didn’t move them to my Recycle folder.  They just disappeared.

They were permanently deleted.

I downloaded a recovery program called Recuva.  It found the jpeg/jpg files, but none of them will show a picture. 

All of the jpg files show the State: “Unrecoverable” and Comment “File header data is empty or the file is securely deleted.”

This is disappointing that iCloud deleted my photos from my PC.