iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

Thanks, but, are you describing a WIndows machine or OSX Lion?

The software you mention is Windows and the folder location doesn't exist like that on my iMac. I have no "iWork" folder like that. I never opened any iCloud docs on my iMac, only on my iPad.

For what it's worth: AppleCare recovery of the iCloud files they deleted failed.

Bottom line: I was told that iOS does not store iWork files in the same format or manner as OSX and this makes recovering them difficult if not impossible. On top of this, once files are tagged by iOS as being iCloud files they DO NOT GET BACKED UP when your iPad is backed up to your Mac (or by association, to Time Machine either).

The final thing I discovered -- entirely on my own --- was that of the "skeleton" or ghost Pages files that survived, there were index.db files for each document. Their sizes closely matched those of my original intact files. (I thought they would be enough for Apple to reconstruct the full documents from but they said they were "useless.")

They were wrong.

The Index.db files don't open with any application and dragging and dropping to text editor did not work. But ...when I manually opened them in text editor they render scraps of actual readable text! I found in them my work scattered, broken, mixed up, repeated many times over, and containing older as well the most recent sections, but there were whole sentences and paragraphs among the mass of coding and near endless strings random characters. If the content of the whole file is copied and opened in Pages it ends up being ten times the length of the original and impossible to edit. But carefully copying selected sections renders useable text.

So, I at least have enough to reconstruct and rebuild the dozen or so most important short files that I desperately need. It will be a pain and a lot of work but it beats losing it all completely.

Why no one at Apple, including their iWork experts and engineers, suggested this or explored this or knew to look into this --- despite being made fully aware of my having index.db files --- I have no clue.

**If anyone out there knows some means of opening an iWork Pages index.db file in a manner that makes it more readable or useable, please let me know.**

Meanwhile, be warned: ICloud essentially holds all your iWork documents "hostage." They must be recognized by the cloud every time you access them even if you are not "working online." They really exist only as long as iCloud permits -- in other words, nothing corrupts their identification within iCloud. Otherwise, they can be deleted en masse from all your devices in a microsecond without any warning or permission just as has happened to hundreds of users now.

Having to now manually back up all your documents as a precaution defeats the entire point of storing "safely" in the cloud. Pathetic.

Use iCloud at your own peril.

JC

I and many others here were able to recover lost iCloud files from the Mobile Documents folder on the Mac. From what you write it doesn't sound as if you were following the instructions I have posted a couple of months ago in this thread.

In particular you can't open those files on the Mac. Opening those file with the text editor is not possible. You shouldn't do that. Doing so could damage those files. You shouldn't actually bother with any of those files inside the document directory. All you have to do is to move/copy and rename the whole directory.

Currently, iWorks '09 is not able to open those files on the Mac. I guess, the next version of iWorks for Mac will be able to open those files directly. But until then, it's not possible.

Thus, following my instructions you are able to make iCloud rediscovered those lost documents.

Again: as you don't write what you found where exactly and what you did exactly to those directories found it's impossible to tell where you went wrong or whether in fact your files are not recoverable... Thus to begin with, I would suggest you post what you found where exactly on your Mac...

I can always recover an older version of those iCloud documents from the Time Machine backups of my Mac...

Thank you for the reply and the effort.

To be clear, please note that I never opened nor accessed any of my iWork Pages files on my Mac (if that makes a differences in whether or not any files would appear in the mobile documents folder).

That my documents went missing shortly after starting up iCloud on a Lion installation is the only common connection/factor AppleCare could ascertain.

All the files I found in the Lib mob doc diretcory Pages ~tef folders of my iMac I copied to work with. I haven't touched the orginals. What I found for each Pages document were:

buildVersionHistory.plist

index.viewstate

index.db

And a preview jpg

For some of the documents there was also a metadata.plist file.

That’s it.

All of this was provided to the AppleCAre engineers in the forms of a screen shot and a list.

Every solution I have seen online here so far was predicated on my having a mob doc delete folder within the iMac Library, something which I never had. It didn't show up even in the earliest Time Machine back up we searched.

Because even a restore of my iPad to a date prior to iCloud deleting the files made no difference, AppleCare said it was apparently because the cloud was more or less still automatically “tagging” the Pages files as soon as Pages tried to read them --- even though the iPad was not connected to the internet after the restore ⚠ In other words, because of some corruption (likely associated with my new Lion set up accessing the cloud) iCloud thinks it “owns” the files and so interposes itself between Pages and whatever remains of the documents.

After using Time Machine to restore the mob doc directory, on my iPad the documents show up only as ghost icons with the names and orginal dates. After retsoring the iPad they then appeared in the same way except with new dates.

If you have any suggestion or link I am eager to see it. Thanks.

JC

1. You are not supposed to do anything with the contents of the document folders! Don't change it. Don't touch it. All what matters is the whole complete directory! It doesn't matter which files are in the directory exactly as long as whole directory is intact.

2. You wrote before you have opened files with the text editor. Now you write you have never accessed any of your files on your Mac. What is it?

3. Did you try renaming the folders as I have suggested?

you were following the instructions I have posted a couple of months ago in this thread.

Reading this just now, could you "point" to your earlier post. i would really like to know more about the subject.

thanks,

ed

It's on the second page of this thread (if you have 15 posts per page), I think the 19th post in the thread.

I hope this link works: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3382799?start=15&tstart=0#16398046

Great! Very ingenious. I copied it into one of my 'NoteBooks' (circusponies.com) for reference. I can see where this could happen - although I use iCloud sparingly.

Like most more mature users, I look forward to Apple using beta testers over the age of 30 for their innovations.

thank you,

ed

I described that I copied the mob doc folder from time machine back up as per AppleCare instructions. One copy I used to experiment with the files and another was used to replace the at the time then empty mob doc folder as per ApplecCare instructions. (They were watching my screen live at the time to walk me through it.) As I stated, I never accessed, altered, or experimented with the original copy, just an extra copy. Make sense?

I looked at this solution previously weeks ago.

I even showed it to one of the AppleCare senior advisors.

I wish I could have used some version of it.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned several times already in my posts, it was not applicable to me for the following reason: I did not have any ~/Library/Mobile Documents.delete. folder to use.

Let me stress that again: there was no such delete folder on my iMac.

Such a folder is apparently created if and only if you have previously accessed iCloud via your Mac.

I didn't.

I didn't have iCloud on my iMac until I loaded Lion for the first time.

Two days later iCloud killed my iCloud files on my iPad.

The only explanation that AppleCarfe would even entertain was that the new Lion set up must have somehow inexplicably overwrote my iCloud account to tell it I that had no iWork documents. That's a pretty huge bug.

Anyway, I am open to experimenting but I don't want to screw anything up on iCloud again.

JC

1. The delete Folder is only a source where to recover those files. That does not prevent you from following those instructions. That absolutely does not prevent you from renaming those document folders as I did to recover those documents. You keep writing you didn't have the delete folder but you don't write if you have ever renamed those folders as I suggested.

2. It is still unclear to me where you have found those document files which you are trying to get back into iCloud. Now you wrote:

JCX2009 wrote:

Let me stress that again: there was no such delete folder on my iMac.

Such a folder is apparently created if and only if you have previously accessed iCloud via your Mac.

I didn't.

I didn't have iCloud on my iMac until I loaded Lion for the first time.

Two days later iCloud killed my iCloud files on my iPad.

The only explanation that AppleCarfe would even entertain was that the new Lion set up must have somehow inexplicably overwrote my iCloud account to tell it I that had no iWork documents. That's a pretty huge bug.

This sounds to me as if you don't have anything which you could try to recover. You have had documents in iCloud. You have set up Lion which supposedly told iCloud it has no documents. So where did you find those document folders then? If Lion cleared iCloud there would be no documents in the Mobile Documents folder. Where did you take them from?

You must have taken them from the Mobile Documents folder on your Mac and thus you have everything you need to follow those instructions. Maybe you restored the Mobile Documents folder from a backup which wouldn't let iCloud recognize those documents correctly.

I have hopefuly a quick question: what should the file size be? All the documents that I wanted to recover had files szes of 29KB in the index.db file for my iCloud lost documents. All the pages files that were not lost and worked were over 200KB index.db for me.

I haven't followed gvde's steps because I have convinced myself that when the file size is 29KB there's nothing there. I worked with Apple support with instructions from the engineers on file recovery (all the files they sent were 29KB for index.db) and they did not work.

If you think you can recover files of 29KB, I'd like to give your steps a try.

Otherwise I recovered the first page of my (mostly short) lost documents by reading the iWorkPreviews document-scalable.jpg (where there was one) and typing a new document from that.

We did restore the Mobile Documents folder from a backup, which, as you noted, wouldn't let iCloud recognize those documents correctly. This is a screen shot of the contents following that process:

It's not like the weeks -- literrally weeks -- I spent on this with Apple CAre senior advisors was being wasted, you know

Did you then follow the procedure I have described?

Take the first document, "First Tenets.pages-tef".

Rename the folder to "First Tenets.pages". Wait until iCloud syncs it into the cloud and then to your iOS device.

Then rename the folder back to "First Tenets.pages-tef".

Again wait for the sync to complete.

Now try to open the document on your document on your iOS device.

That's how I got all my Numbers documents back into the cloud a couple of times...

My Pages index.db files were all in the 200-400k range.

That's how/why I started to piece them together by opneing the saved copies in text editor. I'd suspect if yours are as small a say then there is sadly nothing in them.

One iWork specialist from France on the forums here stated that without a .xml file no iWork file could be recovered. But the AppleCare expert I talked with at length stated confidently that iOS does not use .xml files, since it does not store documents the same way as OSX does. (Which is why when if change the folder name from ~tef it changes it to a Pages doc that can't be opened by OSX).

As per Gvde's solution above (if I followed it correctly: copying the -tef folder over, changing the name to remove the "-tef", synching, then renaming it back to -tef and resyching), regretably did not cause the file even to appear on my iPad. My iMac auto reformats the file as a Pages doc when the -tef is removed and doesn't reformat it when changed back -- the file retains the pages icon, in other words.

JC