iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

Sad. This is why I know form experience to NEVER upgrade either OSX itself or the iOS Pages app without first waiting weeks or longer. Apple now always screws us over with some disaterous changed they dont tell you about. Glad I waited. My suspicions were warrented.

If you previously open any of your documents on a desktop or laptop, then go into the finder and access the hidden Library folder, which you can do by holding down option while looking at the Go pulldown menu at the very top menu bar. In there you shoudl see a folder called Mobile Documents. Explore itand some of your fiels should be tehre, if not, portion sof their text is actually recoverable by opening files there in Text Edit.

I do a back up to iTunes of my iOS Pages files weekly. Because TimeMachine DOES NOT back up your iCloud documents. ⚠

Apple and OSX have beocme a joke. They dont give a **** about basic functionality and stability. It's now all bells and whistles.

ps

(I previously lost 3 months worth of over 50 iOS Pages documents when I upgraded a new iMac to Mountail Lion. Apple gave me $300 in compensation for their error. Hundreds of others have had the same inexplicable problem. Since then I do not trust iCloud at all.)

Exactly the same thing has happened to all my yearly accounts.

Opened the spreadsheet on the iPad. It said that the file had been deleted on another machine and the it disappeared from the iPad.

I had just upgraded to Maverick on my mac book pro.

I have a Time Machine back up. It it doesn't store icloud docs does it?

Omigod. Taft us HOURS AND HOURS of work!

@guineapig,

Your iCloud documents are visible under 'Mobile Documents' in your library (the one you can access by holding down 'alt' when you hit 'Go' in the menu bar whist looking at your user account in Finder).

Access that and see if Time Machine has backed this folder up. In which case you are lucky!

It works for me, but I am not sure if this is because I made an alias pointing to that folder on my desktop. There is some anectotal evidence (somewhere in this thread if I remember correctly) that Time Machine normally does NOT back up this folder. In that case, set up such an alias and at least you are safe for the future.

iCloud behaves completely unpredictable when machines get added or modified. I lost all my iCloud files last year when I added my new MBP. when I upgraded to Mavericks last week, there was no loss of iWorks files. But, now that iBooks is on iCloud, I lost quite a few .PDF's which I had on iBooks on my iPad. Unpredictable as I said before....😕

By the way, if you use any iWorks application in OSX, be aware that the 'upgraded' versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote are very different from the ones you currently would use and have a lot LESS functionality! And once you have opened a file in the new version, it can no longer be opened in the old one! It may not effect you negatively, but lots of users are livid about this 'downgrade'. There are several threads in the user forums that detail the changes in each of the iWorks apps, read those BEFORE upgrading!! ⚠

AND the new versions of the iWorks apps, such as Keynote, seem not to allow the user to simply save a file other than to iCloud. Before upgrading to the current Keynote a few weeks ago, I could choose to open a presentation in Dropbox in Keynote format would create a Keynote file that could be saved in Dropbox. Now that same process creates not a Keynote file, but a compressed folder with all the elements of the presentation organized as it it is a webpage. There doesn't seem to be way to create a simple single Keynote file (with the extenstion *.key) that can be backed-up. Interestingly, the only way to save your presentation to a single file on Dropbox or GoodReader is to choose Powerpooint format! That works, but if you have video files embedded in yoru presentaiton those slides lose the video and you have to re-insert in Powerpoint.

So now there is no way to create presenation, save it as single file and send that file to another user or even to your own hard drive--and that includes trying to send it to iTunes file sharing!

So in response I started to sue iCloud only to discover that you have to specifically ask that your presentations are saved LOCALLY on the iPad and be very careful when turning iCloud off and on or you the presentations can be wiped from the iPad.

It appears simply removing the Pages app from my iPhone has selectively erased many of my Pages documents stored in iCloud.

Either that or iCloud is having trouble tonight.

This has removed around 20 irreplaceable documents. Does anyone know of a new solution to this problem? I'm going to reinstall Pages on my iPhone, but don't have much faith that that will fix the problem.

Check that. The missing documents seem to have reappeared. This means that either it was an iCloud glitch or reinstalling Pages on the iPhone worked. Either way, I'm making a copy of the Mobile Documents directory to create a secondary backup.

Sadly I don't think anyone has come up with a guaranteed solution to get documents back. My ultimate solution was to move everything to Google Drive. My documents stored there can easily be exported to Word (or other file formats) and I back the Zip file up locally and on Wuala should a disaster ever happen to the datacenter where my documents are stored.

Hi, I'm an oldie who understands very little of how things work today. When I got my iPhone (I now have the iPhone 5), my husband told me to sest my phone to backup to iCloud. I was doing that every night when I plugged in my phone to charge it overnight (I never "set up" anything--just did an automatic backup). However, twice I have lost documents--once it was an entire calendar. This last time I lost one file in one of my apps--my medical history, along with upcoming appointments. I stopped backing up to iCloud since it appears to be very unstable. Two questions: (1) since I set up nothing on iCloud (didn't know I had to), can any lost file (such as the medical app data) be retrieved without restoring (and then losing current data)? and if so, what exactly is the process (remember, I'm an older "girl"); (2) since I have begun to absolutely hate iCloud for ridding me of important data, I am wondering how I would go about backing up my iPhone to iTunes--that, at least, seems more reliable than iCloud. Oh, one more question: why hasn't Apple fixed this really REALLY bad problem? Thank you. Marilyn

I was working on a 13,000 word document, then Pages gave me a 'Document deleted in another location' and now the file is completely gone. I was literally mid-sentence when this happened. I am stupified by this - I was literally writing on it, then a pop-up error came up and the document disappeared before my eyes. I can't find any trace of it on my other devices.

I am at a loss for words - I am so disgusted by Apple right now. I am going to immediately back up my files, but losing a document that I've spent so much time on for no apparent reason has me furious.

The lesson I am learning is that I am a fool for buying in to Apple's ecosystem.

Do you have your files backed up to Time Machine? If so we may be able to find a previous version of your document.

Also, try this: in the Finder click on the Go menu, then Go to Folder, and when prompted enter "~/Library/".

Find the Mobile Documents folder, then you should find a folder called something like com~apple~Pages. Look through that folder to see if your document is there.

I did try these things - no sign of the document. I did make a full back up of the library folder to make sure no other documents are lost irreperably though. It refused to copy some of the files because of the version of Pages I had (???), but compressing the folder and moving that worked well.

I feel for you. I too have lost several files, but not as large as yours. I seem to remember Pages on my iPad telling me something incomprehensible about needing to upgrade on my Mac, and it was just after upgrading, I think, that my files vanished...right before my eyes...with the "deleted at another location" message.

Like you, the /Library/ suggestion has come up fruitless.

What with iCloud eating my files and the NSA snooping with the connivance of Google, Apple, Microsoft and all the rest, my faith in ALL forms of Cloud computing is now zero. I will never trust my data with any of these clowns, so it's back to USB sticks and external hard drives for me as back ups.

What is even more remarkable is that this thread is now more than two years old, and Apple still haven't fixed the problem. AND their iCloud still labels Pages as Beta - so they know it doesn't work right, and they're quite happy to let their customers have hours of hard work destroyed in an instant.

They used to say about Apple products, 'it just works'. Not any more.

Have you looked in the Time Machine backup of that 'libraries' folder? (assuming you do TM backups)

I have put a link to that folder on my desktop and since I have done that, Time Machine backs up the folder and iCloud documents seem to be backed up.

Don't know if it was also the case before I created that link.

I also lost iCloud documents in a similar way, from verious examples in this tread it seems to happen when a new piece of equipment is added to the iCloud account (in my case a MBP). Apple certainly do not have the Cloud comuting thing sorted yet, which is pretty disappointing after at least 2 years....

I've deleted documents on both iPhone, and iMac running Time Machine, and restoredthis way:

Open the application on your Mac ( I was also using Pages) then select menu File / Open / and then select iCloud, not On My Mac.

Now you should see a list of your Pages documents in iCloud.

Open Time Machine and go back to a time you can see your deleted document, select the document to recover and then select Recover.

I've lost documents twice, never saw then in ~library/Mobile documents, and when I test deleting they disappear from that location.

I also suggest writing a test document and following it into your Mobile documents and iCloud. See how it updates with and without internet access to keep in sync, and then test deleting your test document until you are confident you can recover it. Otherwise you'll be too distracted by apprehension to get it right the first time you actually loose a document. It may "just work" for Steve, but if you are a normal person you'll need to test and practice first. The time invested will be worth it.

Good luck,

David

I have 3 iPads and just got a iPhone 5, after I setup my iPhone I noticed all of my pages documents were gone from all my devices. I think there was a pages update and now all my data is gone. I thought I could rely on Apple, but this was very disappointing. From what I am reading there is no way to get back this date.....NOT GOOD.