iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

Hello

I have the same problem when I installed ICloud all my documents, Page, Number and Keynotes disappeared from my IPad . I have one IPad and à MacBook Pro.I have two accounts one Mobile me and one for ITunes connection.

I went on ICloud.com , on my Mac book pro and I logged with my ITunes login and there, I found all my documents on IWork. (I don't have IWork on m'y MacBook )

Then I dowloaded my documents in excel,word,power point format and transferred again on my IPad with drop box .

For now it works, my documents do not disappeared on the Cloud.

I hope this help some of you. Like you I was very angry with this incident but everything seems ok

TrionaS,

Hey thank gvde as well, as he was the first one to identify that having signed into iCloud with different UN and PW could be the problem. I think Apple is way at fault here for using the default MobileMe address and password when doing the iCloud upgrade on the iMac. See the post above yours from Jean... for using Dropbox as a way of getting your docs and spreadsheets back onto your iPad.

I'm having a virtual drink on you and a real one later on! Glad to have helped avert your breakdown... you can come out of your darkened room now!

Cheers,

Peter Feer

Hey guys,

I hate to do this to you... but I just fired up Pages & Numbers on my iPad, and watched documents disappear again.

This time, it wasn't everything. It was only the folders I created. i.e. I had 11 Numbers documents, with 8 of them in folders. I watched the folders disappear, and it showed the remaining three documents still sitting there. However, on trying to select and open those documents, nothing happens. The only document I can edit is the Getting Started doc.

So PLEASE... as I've mentioned before, whenever you edit any document, click the Wrench Icon, choose 'Share and Email' and click 'Send to iTunes'. This could save you a lot of heart-ache later.

So I too have an issue and tried the fix but I only tried it after I had installed Lion. Meaning, I hadn't had acess to Mobile Documents so I bought Lion and hoped that the Deleted folder would rear it's head. No luck. Now I'm $30 poorer and still without my documents. I've been on the phone with Apple for hours but with out any official answer. I ended up losing all my files after I cycled though my battery on my 4S. I have read in several places that the main cause is restarting a device with iCloud installed. I also back up to iCloud so I can't use a backup from iTunes. I've erased everything on my iPad and restored from iCloud three times today and each time I can watch my files get erased. Sad.

Hello tasa,

Indeed you can - click on the link here:

https://www.icloud.com/

Enter your Apple ID and Password and... hello my iCloud!

Bookmark it or place it on the Bookmarks Toolbar for quick reference.

Viola 🙂

As much as I appreciate your support, I think this is a misrepresentation of the facts. After I read your post I reviewed this and other discussions extensively, and it appears that this would require a bunch of workarounds and still not be fully functional in the way that working from a Lion-installed Mac would.

Until Apple makes an official statement and proven (through user experience) that they have modified iCloud to be fully compatible with Snow Leopard, I think I'll hold off on trying to use iCloud with my MacBook Pro for now.

Thanks anyway.

tasa: I think you misunderstand. iCloud.com isn't "using" iCloud with your Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard and there aren't any workarounds. This is merely a way to access your iCloud information anywhere at any time on any computer, not just Macs but anything with a browser.

@tasa Lion is required to have iCloud integrated with your desktop/laptop. However, if you want another method that isn't quite as seamless as the one I made above, try setting your phone to automatically backup to iTunes every night. Which if it's anything like the icloud backup, it should automatically do every time you charge your phone as long as your computer is on with itunes open. You could also just turn off the Documents section of your iCloud (I'd save all your files to your computer before doing this seeing that doing that will also delete the files on your iOS device). I think that I will be turning off iCloud Document storage until Apple has resolved this issue or at least gives us a "deleted" option or a "versions" option. Good luck.

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.

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.

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...."