Freeform deleted my boards

I lost my boards due to syncing issues. Here is what I did to restore my boards Via Time Machine.

Open Time Machine

Select Macintosh HD

Users

<Your name of account>

Library**

Containers

Right click on FreeForm folder and restore. A warning will prompt, hit Replace.

Open Freeform and you should get it back.

This helped me get my school work back. I had to copy the boards and move it on a New board so it can sync. To see if it Syncs or not, just try to share it. If it shows Share options, you're good. If it gives you an error, open board and copy it to a New board. Copy Paste.

I hope this can help someone. It worked for me.

**(If you don't see Library, Go to top bar, View, Show View options, Check box Show Library Folder, then close View options)

I was successful from my time machine on my Mac by pulling the container folder of Freeform.

As far as the phone goes, this might work for you.

Try to restore your phone from backup from the time before you try to sync your Freeform. It might restore the boards.

Macintosh HD>Users>[Your name of account]>Library>Containers>FreeForm. Just copy the whole FreeForm folder.

Everything in that folder keeps the boards together.

I did a test by copying the folder. Overwriting the one on the Mac and it restored the boards I had before.

As I dive deeper, it seems that all our boards are stored in a data folder as a combined data file. Boards are not stored as a single traditional file like PDFs, Pages, Jpgs, etc.

No clue why they did it this way but surely makes it hard to backup and restore.

If your boards from device A do not show up on device B, making a new board on device B may help.

That seems to trigger a sync or move the sync priority up a notch and then existing boards from other devices typically appear.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to get my board back. I’ve noticed a lot of people had a problem syncing Freeform to their iCloud, including myself. I wasn’t able to sync and lost the board. Thank you for your help though

Apple is this a joke??? I lost all my boards! How do you roll this out?!?!

Fasulo wrote:

Ive started using freeform, and had 4-5 boards on my MacBook Pro. Today I wanted to look at them on my phone but noticed they were not syncing. I googled how to sync freeform, and one page said to go into Apple ID and re-check freeform in the app sync, which I did. This resulted in my losing all of my freeform boards from my laptop. How do I recover these?

Have you tried rebooting the machine and compare your results...?

I see you are not alone...ref: Freeform boards disappeared from my mac - Apple Community

To be proactive you can file a bug report /submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

Hey Teiws, your solution worked! I created a new board on my iPhone, and that new board synced to my iPad (where I originally started creating boards), then I created a new board on my iPad and after doing that, all the boards on my iPad synced to my iPhone.

Thanks so much,

BB

You all might want to read here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254531001

FreeForm is not an Apple app, it's 3rd party. If you have problems, contact the developer. TheLittles has the relevant reply in the above thread

Then why is it bundled with my MacBook and Mac makes it unable to be deleted? That link was not helpful for what happened to me and seemingly so many other people here. The syncing of an iOS device does not work if it wasn't syncing in the first place. Within iCloud, it is listed as one of their apps to toggle on an off. When toggling on the iCloud sync it said "are you sure" and after hitting yes, it deleted everything I had and the library folder someone hinted at above did not exist either.

Did you do this on your computer, I’m trying to do it on my phone. Please help!

That happened to me it seems now that I lost my files trying to resolve a sync issue. I will not use the apps anymore and I recommend to all not to use Freeform.

I was in the process of switching to Mac software when it deleted a massive 3 month long itinerary.

Never starting a doc with Mac software ever again. Deleting Pages, Numbers, all of them.