iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

I don't think Peter's solution is relevant for most of us but good luck for him.

I just got a a very polite reply back from AppleCare saying "There is nothing we can do to restore your documents automatically deleted by themselves off your iPad and iCloud. Apple have not acknowledged this as a real problem as we are unable to replicate the issue and have not had enough complaints."

Seriously.

I have a recording of the conversation.

I need to blog this. What a total screw up. I was just about to buy my first Mac. No way!

Anyone want to buy a cheap iPad?

Cost me $1,000. What a waste of money and time losing all my work. Unbelievable.

Happy to report that for those who access iCloud via Snow Leopard (OS 10.6.8) the problem appears to have been resolved here as well. Have not lost any documents in iCloud including those created on my iPad 2 or uploaded to my Mac (including MS Word files) for at least two days now.

For those who have had documents deleted there is valuable info here to recover same. However if original files were moved instead of copied it could well mean there is no formerly hidden files to recover.

For those who have had issues with Apple Care I suggest calling. Relate the issue and this one post (now 10 pages) and reference the article in Macworld (all the information you require is within this post - long though it is).

If you are not happy call Apple Customer Service - all Apple Care help unfortunately is not equal and they can escalate your issue if front line support can't help.

I thought iCloud couldn't be accessed with Snow Leopard????

Hello

I have the same problem when I installed ICloud all my documents, Page, Number and Keynotes disappeared from my IPad . I have one IPad and à MacBook Pro.I have two accounts one Mobile me and one for ITunes connection.

I went on ICloud.com , on my Mac book pro and I logged with my ITunes login and there, I found all my documents on IWork. (I don't have IWork on m'y MacBook )

Then I dowloaded my documents in excel,word,power point format and transferred again on my IPad with drop box .

For now it works, my documents do not disappeared on the Cloud.

I hope this help some of you. Like you I was very angry with this incident but everything seems ok

Thank you SO much Peter- I was about to have a breakdown!

It's all there in my old username.

Have a (virtual) drink on me...

*goes to lie down in a darkened room*

TrionaS,

Hey thank gvde as well, as he was the first one to identify that having signed into iCloud with different UN and PW could be the problem. I think Apple is way at fault here for using the default MobileMe address and password when doing the iCloud upgrade on the iMac. See the post above yours from Jean... for using Dropbox as a way of getting your docs and spreadsheets back onto your iPad.

I'm having a virtual drink on you and a real one later on! Glad to have helped avert your breakdown... you can come out of your darkened room now!

Cheers,

Peter Feer

Hey guys,

I hate to do this to you... but I just fired up Pages & Numbers on my iPad, and watched documents disappear again.

This time, it wasn't everything. It was only the folders I created. i.e. I had 11 Numbers documents, with 8 of them in folders. I watched the folders disappear, and it showed the remaining three documents still sitting there. However, on trying to select and open those documents, nothing happens. The only document I can edit is the Getting Started doc.

So PLEASE... as I've mentioned before, whenever you edit any document, click the Wrench Icon, choose 'Share and Email' and click 'Send to iTunes'. This could save you a lot of heart-ache later.

So I too have an issue and tried the fix but I only tried it after I had installed Lion. Meaning, I hadn't had acess to Mobile Documents so I bought Lion and hoped that the Deleted folder would rear it's head. No luck. Now I'm $30 poorer and still without my documents. I've been on the phone with Apple for hours but with out any official answer. I ended up losing all my files after I cycled though my battery on my 4S. I have read in several places that the main cause is restarting a device with iCloud installed. I also back up to iCloud so I can't use a backup from iTunes. I've erased everything on my iPad and restored from iCloud three times today and each time I can watch my files get erased. Sad.

Hello tasa,

Indeed you can - click on the link here:

https://www.icloud.com/

Enter your Apple ID and Password and... hello my iCloud!

Bookmark it or place it on the Bookmarks Toolbar for quick reference.

Viola 🙂

As much as I appreciate your support, I think this is a misrepresentation of the facts. After I read your post I reviewed this and other discussions extensively, and it appears that this would require a bunch of workarounds and still not be fully functional in the way that working from a Lion-installed Mac would.

Until Apple makes an official statement and proven (through user experience) that they have modified iCloud to be fully compatible with Snow Leopard, I think I'll hold off on trying to use iCloud with my MacBook Pro for now.

Thanks anyway.

tasa: I think you misunderstand. iCloud.com isn't "using" iCloud with your Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard and there aren't any workarounds. This is merely a way to access your iCloud information anywhere at any time on any computer, not just Macs but anything with a browser.

Okay, I have found a way to backup iCloud without much hassle. It requires: the latest version of iOS, the latest version of Lion, a Dropbox account and a computer on to back up everything when you want. I'm going to use pages in my examples but it works with all the other iWork apps.

1. Set up iCloud on your computer in the system settings of Lion so you can find the Mobile Documents folder.
2. You can get to the Mobile Documents folder by locating "Go" in the utility bar while in the Finder Application and typing in ~/Library/ into the text box. This will bring up the user Library folder which has been hidden in Lion.
3. Download the MacDropAny application here: http://www.dropboxwiki.com/MacDropAny#Download (any version above 1.6 is okay for Lion)
4. Create the symbolic folder in your dropbox folder.
5. Here is the beauty of this set up, Dropbox gives you free versioning in their system. This will allow you to find deleted files with ease. (I wont give instructions about this but this link will tell you more about recovering old folders/files : https://www.dropbox.com/help/11 )
6. This is the tricky part, the recovery process:
   1. Once you realize that you have to recover the entire folder (named xxx.pages-tef) for the files you then have to change the name a couple of times:
   2. After you restore the folder to its rightful place you have to rename it to xxx.pages (just remove the -tef part) : this will make a file with a pages icon show up but it will act as if you made it with an older version of pages (even though it was made with iOS pages)
   3. Then, again, rename it back to xxx.pages-tef (this then changes the file back to something that iWork in iOS can read and it should open.

      ***WARNING*** When I tried this the first few times it didn't work correctly after I changed the file, the file just went missing in Pages. It wasn't until I changed the file name almost immidately after the first rename that it worked like it should. This may be a glitch, but try to make the file changes rather quickly after the first attempt.

   4. You should see the file in it's normal place. This sounds like a lot of work, but this ensures you with not only a backup for your iWork files, but also a versioning system that you can use when you (or your kid) makes changes to a document that you don't like.

I hope this helps people out. I'm still missing all of my original files since I didn't have this set up earlier, but now I'll never miss another document again since I'll have two clouds working for me at all times.

I'm continuing to have problems with disappearing documents, and it does seem to me to have something to do with various devices getting confused about logins.

I'm a very long time mobileme user, going back to dotmac days.

My original account was myname@mac.com

which was changed to myname@me.com

but I continued to use myname@mac.com because all my clients etc had that address

Of course, it didn't matter which was the login.

To login to iCloud on the new iPhone and the iPad, I had to use myname@me.com, and I did.

And I've entered that login on the iMac and the MacBookAir as well.

However, sometimes when I open something - either Pages on the iPad or iPhone, or the iCloud webpage on a computer, it seems I've somehow been logged in using myname@mac.com

I don't know whether this is happening because of - maybe - keychain or whatever but it is extremely frustrating.

It's taking hours of systems admin work, which is precisely what I expect to avoid on the Apple platform.

All the best to the iWork team working on this. We're out here getting pretty desperate for a solution!

And, can we please have an option to save / backup new documents and edited documents onto the iPhone or iPad so that it just happens and we know we have backup? Thanks.

And without Lion I can't backup iCloud, and when iCloud fails I lose everything, right?

@tasa Lion is required to have iCloud integrated with your desktop/laptop. However, if you want another method that isn't quite as seamless as the one I made above, try setting your phone to automatically backup to iTunes every night. Which if it's anything like the icloud backup, it should automatically do every time you charge your phone as long as your computer is on with itunes open. You could also just turn off the Documents section of your iCloud (I'd save all your files to your computer before doing this seeing that doing that will also delete the files on your iOS device). I think that I will be turning off iCloud Document storage until Apple has resolved this issue or at least gives us a "deleted" option or a "versions" option. Good luck.