iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

Oh dear.

I have to do a presentation for 200 people tomorrow morning. I worked on the script all afternoon on the iPad and saved it to iCloud. Now it's gone. Unbelievable.

Why oh why did I trust a .0 release?

I take it from this thread that there are no solutions, and I'd better get to work rewriting the script. That's what I'll do. It's 9:30 p.m. in Sydney and my audience will be ready to go at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Pfft.

i too have lost all my documents - 4 yrs worth of psychotherapy training notes. extremely angry. rang apple support - they couldnt understand it. due to ring me back but never did.

i have tried again with test docunments but it keeps happening.

praying that they are there but not visable.

if anyone gets solutions share them PLEASE.

The instructions posted by gvde do work--they allowed me to recover my documents last night. They've been deleted again since then, but I was able to save them to my normal Documents folder on my Mac, safe and sound.

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I have managed to get my Numbers documents back:

1. I have copied the documents folder in "~/Library/Mobile Documents.delete.Sat Oct 15 09:01:32 2011/com~apple~Numbers/Documents" to "~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Numbers/Documents".

AGAIN: MAKE A COPY! Don't move the folder in case it doesn't work. Maybe even make a second copy fo the whole ".delete" folder to have a backup copy available!

2. I have renamed each document folder, removing the ending "-tef", e.g. renamed "My First Document.numbers-tef" to "My First Document.numbers". This makes the document appear in iCloud shortly afterwards. You can't open it as it is considered a document created by the Mac Numbers application.

3. I have renamed each document folder back, i.e. "My First Document.numbers" to "My First Document.numbers-tef"

4. Now iCloud seems to sync it up again and recognizes it. It reappers on my iPad and I can open it.

5. I did this for each of my 9 documents. If you have more, you may want to use a little script.

6. To get the previews back I have also copied the contents of "~/Library/Mobile Documents.delete.Sat Oct 15 09:01:32 2011/com~apple~Numbers/iWorkPreviews" to "~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Numbers/iWorkPreviews"

Now everything seems to be O.K. Documents are back. They show up on icloud.com, iPad and iPhone. I haven't done anything with Numbers the last two days thus at least for me: no loss.

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Can anyone tell me where I find the mobile delete documents on lion. I just can't see them to see if gvde suggestion will work for me.

Either use Terminal or use Finder, Menu Go, Go to Folder... or press Apple-Shift-G. Enter "~/Library" to go into the hidden Library Folder.

Great I have found them but only as a

Preview what do I do to get the whole document back?

Thanks for all the help guys.

When in Finder, highlight the "Go" menu. While it's showing, press the Option key on your keyboard and "Library" will appear in the menu. Click on "Library" and a Finder window will open with Library highlighted. In the next column, Mobile Documents should appear, hopefully more than once. These are you backups. However, not all of my documents appeared there. I think this syncing had happened in the background on the occasions that I logged into iCloud from the computer.

Good luck.

Within the Mobile Documents folder, there are folders for Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Within each if those folders there should be two folders: one for iWork Previews (sounds like you're in that one) and another for the Documents themselves. So try backing up one folder level.

Ok done that but in the doc folder I see - folders of all my documents. When I open one up I have a plist doc (build version history.plist) is its title. A further called

Index.db then another preview folder. Opening the other docs I mentioned either gives me computer script or says can't be opened?

I thought I had found a solution, but it didn't work: after approximately 12 hours the iCloud servers deleted all documents once again and created automatically a "Mobile Documents.delete" folder in my library. It is as if a script were run at regular intervals telling one of my devices to perform a resync and delete. I have an appointment set with Applecare and I will address the issue then.

I have some good news. I was contacted by the "iWork team" on my mail yesterday. They said they had read my earlier post here and they asked me a couple of questions: Did I have two Apple ID:s, did I have early versions of iCloud or the latest update from Lion (no), and some more questions.

I answered all the questions, and it certainly seemed that they have some suspects, and that they're narrowing down what's wrong.

This morning, when I checked my mail again, I got a mail from them with a debugger software to install on my phone. So I installed it, and then I went through all the steps that makes my files disappear. That is: I created a file on my phone, it got uploaded on iCloud, and then, after a while and the usual fiddling with the phone, when i opened Pages again, it flashed for a moment and then it was gone.

I've just sent them the log files and hopefully they now have an exact log of what is going wrong.

I'm kind of impressed that they took action like this. It's a very clever way to get the most out of the forum.

I'll keep you posted if they get back to me.

i was also contacted and gave info - however no fix for me yet!!!

ps can anyone fathom my last post re my docs available as preview but not as full docs?

feel sooo close to gettting them back but just not quiet there!

All my numbers documents have vanished from my ipad2 and iphone3GS in the way previously described. Solutions offered refer to using a Mac. I don't have one of these. I haven't Synced to iTunes since I created the documents, so surely connecting to my PC won't help. Any solutions please?

I'm just using an iphone at this point as well. I was able to get my iwork/icloud stable. I had originally changed my icloud main ID from one Apple ID to another and thats when things started being deleted. I removed both accounts from my phone, then re-entered them, using the original account for the main icloud again. Now it "appears" to be working.

Alan were you able to retrieve your documents? I have checked my "iCloud" on iCloud.com and the deleted documents do not appear in the iWork section. I am a bit reluctant to delete the account, as I am worried any chance of retrieving the missing documents will be lost.