iCloud deleted my documents. How do I get them back

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

Thomas Grugle wrote:

My documents disapeared, I found them in the deleted items folder and do not know what to do with them. They won't open on my mac. If I email them to my iOs device they don't open there either. They are in mobile document format and I don't know what to do with them.

Did you find your documents in the "Mobile Documents" folder or in a folder "Mobile Documents.delete.<date>"?

So you did not copy the folder and changed the name back and forth? Of course, it doesn't work. You have to copy the whole folder for each document to the Mobile Documents folder for your application, then rename the folder removing the ending -tef, then rename it back adding -tef again. Then you should be able to use it again.

I wrote before what you have to do: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3382799?start=15&tstart=0#16398046

If you copy from me so frankly, please at least post the link to my original message:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3382799?start=18&tstart=0

timpppa wrote:

Hi there everyone!

I also lost all my iWork documents yesterday. I opened a case to apple regarding this but haven't heard from them yet.

I managed to salvage all but my Keynote files back to iCloud. I did the following steps from terminal:

1. I have copied the documents folder in "~/Library/Mobile Documents.delete.Wed Jan 4 09:19:53 2012/com~apple~Numbers" to "~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Numbers".

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.

if you have many documents using a short cmd line script is helpful;

# for i in *.numbers-tef; do mv "$i" "${i/.numbers-tef}".numbers; done

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.

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

Hi all, this is how I fixed this problem:

1. on your mac: search for folder user/library/mobile documents.deleted...
2. there you will find folders for Keynote, Numbers and Pages (in my case these were the files icloud deleted by mistake)
3. Make a copy of these folders on your desktop or somewhere else!!
4. then copy the documents from the deleted folder into the library user/library/mobile documents
5. rename the folders from .numbers-tef into .numbers
6. after that they will appear on your iOS device that is linked to icloud
7. start Pages, Keynote or Numbers your iOS device
8. as you will not be able to open the documents from your iOS device you will have to email them to yourself using the built-in API
9. on your iOS device: open the document out of mail via "open in numbers"
10. your file will be opened by Pages, Numbers or Keynote
11. Rename it from file-1 into file
12. there you are!!

Good luck to all and Apple please fix this bug immediatelly!!!

florian from dettingen wrote:

Hi all, this is how I fixed this problem:

1. on your mac: search for folder user/library/mobile documents.deleted...
2. there you will find folders for Keynote, Numbers and Pages (in my case these were the files icloud deleted by mistake)
3. Make a copy of these folders on your desktop or somewhere else!!
4. then copy the documents from the deleted folder into the library user/library/mobile documents
5. rename the folders from .numbers-tef into .numbers
6. after that they will appear on your iOS device that is linked to icloud
7. start Pages, Keynote or Numbers your iOS device
8. as you will not be able to open the documents from your iOS device you will have to email them to yourself using the built-in API

You don't have to do nos. 6-12. Instead, after renaming the folders from .numbers-tef to .numbers, making them appear in iClouds, rename the folders back to .numbers-tef. Now you can open the documents again...

gvde wrote:

florian from dettingen wrote:

Hi all, this is how I fixed this problem:

1. on your mac: search for folder user/library/mobile documents.deleted...
2. there you will find folders for Keynote, Numbers and Pages (in my case these were the files icloud deleted by mistake)
3. Make a copy of these folders on your desktop or somewhere else!!
4. then copy the documents from the deleted folder into the library user/library/mobile documents
5. rename the folders from .numbers-tef into .numbers
6. after that they will appear on your iOS device that is linked to icloud
7. start Pages, Keynote or Numbers your iOS device
8. as you will not be able to open the documents from your iOS device you will have to email them to yourself using the built-in API

You don't have to do nos. 6-12. Instead, after renaming the folders from .numbers-tef to .numbers, making them appear in iClouds, rename the folders back to .numbers-tef. Now you can open the documents again...

I can't get either method to work. I've got my documents to show up on my ipad using this method but can't do anything from there.

If I try and open them I get "Spreadsheet couldn't be imported." message. If I try to email the file it just hangs with the progress bar not moving, when I try to cancel numbers crashes.

This is asinine that there is no word on this.

Okay, I have found a way to backup iCloud without much hassle. It requires: the latest version of iOS, the latest version of Lion, a Dropbox account and a computer on to back up everything when you want. I'm going to use pages in my examples but it works with all the other iWork apps.

1. Set up iCloud on your computer in the system settings of Lion so you can find the Mobile Documents folder.
2. You can get to the Mobile Documents folder by locating "Go" in the utility bar while in the Finder Application and typing in ~/Library/ into the text box. This will bring up the user Library folder which has been hidden in Lion.
3. Download the MacDropAny application here: http://www.dropboxwiki.com/MacDropAny#Download (any version above 1.6 is okay for Lion)
4. Create the symbolic folder in your dropbox folder.
5. Here is the beauty of this set up, Dropbox gives you free versioning in their system. This will allow you to find deleted files with ease. (I wont give instructions about this but this link will tell you more about recovering old folders/files : https://www.dropbox.com/help/11 )
6. This is the tricky part, the recovery process:
   1. Once you realize that you have to recover the entire folder (named xxx.pages-tef) for the files you then have to change the name a couple of times:
   2. After you restore the folder to its rightful place you have to rename it to xxx.pages (just remove the -tef part) : this will make a file with a pages icon show up but it will act as if you made it with an older version of pages (even though it was made with iOS pages)
   3. Then, again, rename it back to xxx.pages-tef (this then changes the file back to something that iWork in iOS can read and it should open.

      ***WARNING*** When I tried this the first few times it didn't work correctly after I changed the file, the file just went missing in Pages. It wasn't until I changed the file name almost immidately after the first rename that it worked like it should. This may be a glitch, but try to make the file changes rather quickly after the first attempt.

   4. You should see the file in it's normal place. This sounds like a lot of work, but this ensures you with not only a backup for your iWork files, but also a versioning system that you can use when you (or your kid) makes changes to a document that you don't like.

I hope this helps people out. I'm still missing all of my original files since I didn't have this set up earlier, but now I'll never miss another document again since I'll have two clouds working for me at all times.

I had the same thing happen to me when I restarted my IPad. Even if I went to the icloud.com web page, Nothing, all my spreadsheets from Numbers have vanished into thin air. I'm just glad I just started using Numbers and didn't have anything non replaceable disappear. I finally saved my spreadsheets with the iTunes option so I could at least have a way to retrieve my spreadsheets. I have put spreadsheets into the "cloud" and restarted my iPad to see if restarting is what caused it, and sure enough, each time spreadsheets are gone. Hope there will be a fix for this soon. I just feel for the folks that have spent weeks or even months on a doc. just to have it "lost" in the clouds.

Just a recommendation to future responders.

See if you can put any future files onto an external hard drive and then eject that drive when you are done.

Evidently I answered part of my question about what to do. However, I have started a discussion thread about that very feature. Click my name and all of you should see it (check under recent activity).

Give your thoughts there about my recommendation for modifying this portion of iCloud.

Other than this, I have issues with the iCloud service itself.

Just chiming in....

The same occurred to me as well. Everything was working fine with iWork docs in iCloud until this morning when all, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote docs disappeared from iCloud and my iPad.

I reimported my lost docs via iTunes, and an hour later they disappeared again. Reinstalled Numbers on my iPad, but problem still occurred. My documents are primarily time-based log sheets, and restoring from a backup is not an option.

Apple, please let us know what the issue or work around is.

Same for me, all documents lost. Keynote, Numbers, Pages, GoodReader, Sketchbook.

Very disappointing. It looks like the documents are no longer stored in my local backup so all atemps to restore them fail.

Any suggestions to get the data back are highly appreciate.

Hopefully the genius guys have a solution.

Same for me I even up loaded a file to icloud through my MAC and it appeared on my ipad....this morning everything is gone. No file on iCloud and no file on my ipad. When I upgraded my ipad to ios5 I lost all of my doucments in pages and keynote. Not good. I cannot get these back. In the mean time if I create a doucment in iwork on my ipad or mac the way i share it is through itunes which seems to be a work around until icloud gets fixed. very frustrating.

Not wanting to do a same here post, but same here. iWork docs successfully synced, viewable on iPad, iPhone and iCloud (via browser). Next day, all iWork docs have disappeared. Also not recoverable from backup as the last computer sync has become the most recent iTunes backup and older backups are not there (I thought iTunes maintained more mobile device backups that *one* backup.) This last backup didn't have iWork docs as they had already been synced to iCloud and then had already disappeared when iPad synced to iTunes :-(

Here's hoping its just a glitch and the docs are still in iCloud, just not visible? Maybe apple will quickly move to offer recover from automated iCloud doc backups?

On my Mac I found two folders in ~/Library:

Mobile Documents

Mobile Documents.delete.Sat Oct 15 09:01:32 2011

each contains directories for the iWorks applications and in each a Documents folder. In "Mobile Documents" each Documents folder is empty. All my latest documents synced from iCloud are still in "Mobile Documents.delete.Sat Oct 15 09:01:32 2011". However, so far I have found no way to make iCloud resync the documents from the delete folder.

I can copy a document into the appropriate application Documents folder and shortly afterwards it shows up in iCloud and on my iPad. E.g. copy a Excel document into Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Numbers/Documents and it shows up.

However, this does not seem to work with the documents synced from my iPad to iCloud which are now in the "Mobile Documents.delete.Sat Oct 15 09:01:32 2011" folder. It doesn't seem to sync them back into the cloud.

So right now, at least I have a almost up-to-date version of my documents saved on my Mac but no way to get it back into the cloud...