iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

My Story so far:

There are three problems to deal with. The first is what was causing all these documents to dissappear. The second is trying to recover the lost documents. The third is maintaining a backup so if this happens again, recovery is possible and easy.

I spent many hours on the phone with apple reps to try and determine what the cause of the problem is. We were able to reproduce the problem by simply turning off my new iPhone 4S and turning it back on. This would cause a sync that removed all documents from iCloud. Essentially anytime I restarted my 4S it would delete all that data.

This seems to be related to all the activation problems. Those of us that had these activation problems may have also triggerred iCloud to be setup incorrectly on our device. This is just a guess. It was not happening on my iPhone 4.

To fix this we simply had to sign out of iCloud in the iCloud settings page and sign back in. It asks you about removing the data from the device or not (it's up to you, iCloud was keeping everything else safe for me and I had Time machine backups of address book and calendar data on my mac). We then went to all my other iCloud enabled devices and restarted them one at a time to make sure they weren't suffering from the same bug. If documents dissappeared that device would need to be signed out of iCloud and signed back in.

For now, my documents have been "stable" since doing this (at least a week). Now onto issue 2 recovering the lost documents.

The "deletedAt" folder. I have personally not seen this. For those of you with an hourly backup and constantly connected time machine backup with documents enabled on icloud on your mac, you have the possibility of recovering your documents from some point in time. I was lucky to have a time machine backup of a version of all the most important files in the Library/Mobile Documents folder from the day before the loss. I just happened to plugin my time machine backup and do a backup the day before. I recovered everything "important".

Apple has officially told me that since the documents were not lost due to a server side bug, they can't get any backups. Essentially the iPhone 4S told iCloud to remove all these documents and iCould did exactly what it was told to do. The bug is in the software for iOS. Again, probably due to activation problems for us early adoptors.

Issue 3 Preventing future issues. Documents and Data are now being synced properly and instantly between all my devices. I moved my Time Machine backup to be network based so it is connected all the time (attached to my airporte extreme). I will now have backups of the Mobile Documents folder. Assuming that conitunes to work correctly, I can always restore recent documents back to iCloud directly from my mac. Apple, however, is not giving any assurances that data will sync to my Mac all the time. It took several days for the sync to happen after it was enabled. This may not be entirely stable.

Unfortunately there is no way I know of to move back to MobileMe. I am exploring that issue with Apple reps as I am not entirely comfortable with the above solutions.

That's my full report. I returned my iPhone 4S as apple was unwilling to provide any reasonable compensation for data loss. I encourage others experiencing this problem to do the same.

Message was edited by: dleute

Adrian, That's pretty much as I understood it, then. Thanks for helping me clarify. Now I'm fighting with myself about installing Lion. After doing my homework last night it looks like just about all my current software EXCEPT Quicken is Lion-comptible. I spent the bucks on Quicken Essentials to see if it was functiional,mand am not impressed. My financial records go back to 1994, so this is a major issue for me.

So I will probably sit tight for now and keep following the discussions. It's just not worth buying into the whole package unless/until the bugs are worked out. I know it is possible to just use iCloud between my ios devices, so I might gingerly give that a try with a non-essential feature, like Reminders (currently I use Appigo's To Do quite successfully), just to see what happens.

I do hope this mess is not a harbinger of bad things to come now that Apple's fearless leader is gone! I can't escape the feeling that ios5 and the iPhone 4s were rushed out of the gate unfinished to counter the financial repercussions of Job's death.

tasa - here is a section of an article which describes what has largely been the major (but not only) focus with iCloud in this particular post - that being the unintended deletion of documents from Pages, Numbers etc. when trying to access same from your Mac desktop and across other iOS devices.

In the decription I gave you on how to access iCloud from your Mac with Snow Leopard you will note the following section which describes the method via Lion.

"Working on documents between a computer and an iOS device requires an extra step. To access your iOS documents from your computer, you will need to use a web browser and go to icloud.com/iwork." - Macworld

Note - accessing iCloud from your Mac in respect to accessing documents, whether it be on Lion or Snow Leopard, is the same. And, yes, Apple does state this, if you had read as extensively as you indicated. Just to be crystal clear, however, not all things relating to iCloud run the same on Lion and Snow Leopard.

Sorry you misunderstood.

Well, duh, I get it, alright already. Now you are just being condescending.

tasa - You were agreeing with some information posted here that is absolutely incorrect - which would indicate to me (or anyone else) that you didn't get it. "Reading extensively" implies beyond this post - where answers to your issue have long since been addressed on-line and in several high profile Mac pubications. Duh! - Really? 😉

So from this thread I learned that my lost Pages and Numbers documents are still on my harddrive in library/mobile documents, though not, as stated here, in a "deleted" folder. So many thanks for that.

But how do I get said documents back onto the iPad? I'm on Safari now, looking at my empty iCloud.com page, no sign of those documents even though i have turned on iCloud sync again in the preferences pane.

Thanks.

Tried your advice and got all my documents back. Thanks!!! 🙂

Short update: Just after my last post, all the documents were wiped by iCloud. I have a copy on my desktop of course, but it seems iCloud has decided that it's boss. No delete folder though, though that's probably not that relevant here, or so i imagine., just for the sake of completeness.

So I am still stuck with the docs (file ending .db, is that right?) on my drive but unopenable. Any suggestions?

Thank you.

Allow me to join the chorus of folks whose documents disappeared. I did locate them in the deleted documents folder in the library, but as they seem to be in iOs format they are unreadable. I don't really care about getting them back in the iCloud (just to watch them disappear again), but I'd like to open the documents. Is there a conversion utility or iOs reader that will allow me to open and edit the documents on my Mac?

And someone really needs to do a satire of the ICloud commercial.."edit your document on me device, and watch it disappear from al your other devices...."

The "conversion utility" is built into iCloud. Just get the documents back into iCloud and you can download them through www.icloud.com.

I think Apple solved the problem. At least for me no more loss for a week now.

Stuart Grimshaw wrote:

So I am still stuck with the docs (file ending .db, is that right?) on my drive but unopenable. Any suggestions?

You don't want the files. You want the whole directory. Each directory represents a file. Follow the instructions as I have posted before. It will get the files back into iCloud.

However, if you have lost your documents but they are still in the normal "Mobile Documents" folder and not in an "Mobile Documents.delete" folder it suggest that your documents did not disappear in iCloud. Thus, make sure you are using the identical Apple ID for iCloud on all your devices. Also make sure not to confuse the Apple ID you are using for iTunes with the Apple ID you are using for iCloud. In particular, if you have converted from MobileMe...

gvde wrote:

Stuart Grimshaw wrote:

So I am still stuck with the docs (file ending .db, is that right?) on my drive but unopenable. Any suggestions?

You don't want the files. You want the whole directory. Each directory represents a file. Follow the instructions as I have posted before. It will get the files back into iCloud.

However, if you have lost your documents but they are still in the normal "Mobile Documents" folder and not in an "Mobile Documents.delete" folder it suggest that your documents did not disappear in iCloud. Thus, make sure you are using the identical Apple ID for iCloud on all your devices. Also make sure not to confuse the Apple ID you are using for iTunes with the Apple ID you are using for iCloud. In particular, if you have converted from MobileMe...

I only have the one account, so that won't be the problem.

However, following your instructions did get my documents back onto iCloud, so many many thanks for that (although I had to duplicate most but not all of the Numbers docs in iCloud to get them usable in the iPad - weird)

Now I'd like very much to turn off iCloud sync altogether from all my devices. To do that on the iPad, I'd lose my documents again, so the Settings tell me. I'd export them via iTunes and reimport them after deactivating iCloud, but the docs are not showing up on the File Sharing window (all other apps' docs are there as they should be). Any suggestions there, anybody? And any idea why those docs aren't available in File Sharing?

Once again, many thanks to gvde.

Hello

I had the same problem I thought I resolved it 4 days ago but it did not work and all my documents are lost on page, numbers and keynotes. So today I spent 3 hours with apple center and at least everething it's now right.

I precise my documents was saved on my Icloud account.

What have we done

reset and erase content and setting on Ipad

started Ipad as a new Ipad

during installation when it asked for and apple ID enter the apple ID used for Itunes (for me I have two ID one for Itunes and the other one for mobile me)

then go to general setting and Icloud. activate documents and data and all other items you want to synchronize on the cloud.

upload again all your apps from the apps store

for page , numbers and keynotes go to general setting and on page, numbers and keynotes activate Use Icloud

At the end all the documents save on Icloud account came back on the Ipad and they stay...

It's worked I create new documents and they stayed on my Ipad and they are saved on the Cloud.

I hope this can help you

This afternoon every last document disappeared from Pages on my iPad after flashing on for a second - after an hour with a Genius at the apple store and 2 1/2 more on the phone with progressively higher level folks at AppleCare I have confirmed that my documents - including several weeks of work not stored anywhere else - are irretrievable thanks to the magic of iCloud (which I had said yes to when downloading the new operating system a few weeks back, but hadn't tried using yet). Yeah, all trust I had in iCloud - and my iPad - is about as irretrievable as my work now. They acted like they'd never seen anything like this before, but it seems to be a well documented issue from this thread. Agonizing.

And now the big question...

Is apple aware of this HUGE!!!! problem?

Icloud is one of the reasons i bought an iPad,

Icloud isn't relaiant

(all my document for my study, projects ect are gone, and also unable to retrieve them.)