iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

I have a couple questions:

1. Are you syncing with any OSX computer, hopefully with Time Machine? You can restore from there.

2. When you setup the iPhone, did you sync it to your other devices, perhaps through OSX iTunes, with their pages documents? Otherwise, if your iPhone became the latest and "updated" version of your documents (with no documents yet), I assume it will tell iCloud that you now have no documents and deleting your iCloud data on all your devices. After all, when you delete an iCloud document on one device, its then deleted on all devices.

I've lost documents this way so now I make sure my documents are backed up before adding another iCloud synced device.

Your logic makes sense. Sort of.

However....

iCloud does more than backup. It is how these devices sync to each other. As soon as I open pages on any device, it opens by updating everything to its last sync. Backups are individual to each device. Adding the new phone should have added all shared content, just as email, contacts and calendar was added to the new phone, Pages would add also as soon as you opened it on the phone and signed in.

There is always the option to double up, and as a bonus, not take up any of your own storage space. Use DropBox, or Box for iOS. box is up to 50GB free storage. Since I move things across platforms, Dropbox is a lifesaver.

I agree with you Liz, I would think the cloud would update my iPhone with the data not the other way around. My numbers data went on my iPhone, I just lost all my pages data. Very surprised at Apple. When I got my 3rd iPad, all the data was imported from the cloud with no problems.

Yes, me too. All my Pages docs disappeared from iCloud and from my iPad. So did my Keynotes docs. I hadn't started using Numbers on the iPad, fortunately. I wasn't aware that you could force Time Machine to back up iCloud. So I'm just out of luck.

BUT: note that I did not update anything. I stayed away from Mavericks, and did not update on the iPad either. That did not protect me. Apple deleted all my files that had any connection to iCloud.

In case anyone out there still hasn't been through this disaster (maybe you've been in Borneo for six months and haven't turned on your computer) I suggest disabling iCloud first thing, then email to yourself all your iWorks docs and back them up somewhere dark and remote that Apple can't reach.

I've gone back to Microsoft Office 😟, and am searching for apps to replace iWorks for iOS. Any suggestions?

Hello jgoshawk,

Are you running Time Machine on OSX?

Time machine backs up iCloud documents. Open the appropriate application as: Pages / file / open / iCloud. When you see the window for iCloud Pages documents, even if the documents are gone now, open Time Machine and go back in time to find and restore.

Thanks bicycle, I didn't know the iCloud docs were back there. Sure enough.

But still there's a glitch. If I try to restore a doc, it comes forward grayed out; won't open in Pages; Quick Look says it has zero bytes. THis happens with all the old files.

At the same time, a progress window appears labeled "Copy" that seems to be trying to copy the old file to a folder called Documents (evidently not my local Documents folder), but nothing transfers. I get an error message saying "The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access..."

I wonder if there's another way to get at them.

This happened to me-I lost a Pages doc on my iPad for no reason when a "document has been deleted at another location' error message came up (it hadn't been deleted at another location). I was able to able to retrieve it by turning off iCloud sync then quickly emailing a version of the doc to myself from my iPhone pages app before it disappeared there, too. The iWork website would've been my next option. For some reason other versions of my Pages weren't affected. Not sure why they haven't fixed this problem, though. Hope this helps somebody.

It was a nasty surprise to turn on my ipad air and go to edit a document in pages and find all my content gone. I have no idea what happened but i did click on a recent 'update'. Went to icloud and there's nothing there either.

10 folders POOF!

Come on apple, Really?

Icloud is now switched off - permanently. I will backup my own content somewhere else.

That's awful.

Scary how this is still happening to peo

But can you give more details, please?

What iOS version?

What device models of yours use iCloud?

What update did you apply to what previous OS versions on what devices?

Scary how this is still happening to people.

I lost some Pages documents through iCloud a couple years ago and that motivated me to understand iCloud better.

Is iCloud really a backup? It can be a backup if you want to start a new device "in sync" for example. But when I think about it... If you are allowed to manage your documents to stay within your allowed iCloud storage size, then you must be able to delete -- permanently.

Time Machine is a backup except where it deletes old files to avoid running out of disk space. Time Machine is where I can reliably restore documents. But in iCloud, if there is a way to restore a document I intentionally or unintentionally delete, I haven't found it, and I can't force myself to look too hard because it doesn't make sense.

On my iPhone I've butt-called too many times so I discipline my actions. Could one "butt-delete" a document, or all documents for that app, like Pages?

Does Apple have a tutiorial on this subject? If we understood these issues so we could manage our devices to prevent unintended deletions that could save a lot of grief.

I have an incomplete understanding but for what I've learned I'm far more confident and haven't had a problem since.

The very same thing just happened to me! After changing the name of a sheet in Numbers, the app quit. When I relaunched, everything was gone!!! Went to Pages, same!!! Problem is around for a long long while apparently. What is Apple doing?!

I am posting this because in the process of updating to iOS 8 there was a space issue on my wife's iPhone. She doesnt use her Pages on the phone so it was deleted. Oops. There went almost 800 documents. Restoring my iPad from backup failed to restore the documents. However I have Time Machine.

Solution:

On my iMac I went to Finder. The Go menu will show Library if you hold down the Option key. Click on it to open a window. Enter Time Machine. Select a time prior to the delete on the timeline. Select the Mobile Documents folder and click on Restore. I simply replaced the folder. I then opened Pages on the my mac and when I went to the File>Open menu the files were populating in the menu as they were recovered to iCloud.

Opening Pages on the iPad the documents slowly appeared. With the number of documents I was recovering it took some time to recover them.

Quite unfortunately, I am on a windows. And all my stuff from iCloud got deleted suddenly while I was working on a document for Spanish class. So don't tell me to go to my Mac or use time machine, because I can't do that. Someone please help!

This happened to me too but I was still lucky enough to,have them on my iPhone 4, so I opened each spreadsheet and sent it to myself by email. I was then given the chance to open them in Numbers and it saved them all again. I hope they stay there. They are now in the Cloud too. If you still have an iPhone 4 you will be OK, but I doubt it with a newer model.

For the second time in two years now iCloud has deleted all of my Pages documents off of my iPad!

Because of the disaster that first happened to me where I lost three months worth of invaluable work, I have since backed up everything multiple places and I do not trust iCloud at all whatsoever. And here they did it to me again.

I have an iPad 3 that I updated to 8.0.2 following after a week of sluggishness using 8.0.

I had all manner of problems getting it to synch and finally had to restore the iPad to factory settings. Then I managed to restore it to my previous backup from days earlier. Again, I encountered all manner of synch errors with it not loading apps. After more than a day of trying to get it to finish syncing it finally did and everything seemed fine. Until that is, I opened Pages last night and all of my documents were missing. More than 75 of them. They are still there in the cloud and I can access them from my desktop but the iPad, despite having all the settings for iCloud the same as they always have been, is telling me there's nothing there when I open Pages. What a cluster-F.

Face it Apple, your software is continuous crap now. Who worries about malware or viruses when IOS 8 is a virus.