I lost nearly four years of Pages documents from iCloud this morning. I woke up my MBP, opened Pages, and all of my Pages documents are missing from the Mac, and on iCloud.com. The data is gone from my iPhone and iPad as well.
I have contacted AppleCare, they are investigating but have given me no reason why the data just up and disappeared.
Any ideas? Please advise, thank you.
OSX 10.10.1
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9)
For safety reasons, my suggestion would be to compress the files which you use least often and put them in their own separate folders on iCloud Drive in the compressed file type which should be split in 2GB pieces. You should only keep your most updated documents in Pages, Numbers, Keynote because these are marked beta which would suggest that you cannot predict what is going to happen with them. DO NOT keep a lot of important files in iCloud apps marked beta. And back up all of your files to compressed archives as directed above. Then you simply need an app to browse the compressed archive and pull out only the files you want at a given time. Hope this helps, but if you have any further questions, feel free to ask.
Unfortunately, your documents are most likely lost forever because iCloud drive syncs with all of your devices. This may be a hard lesson to learn, but now you know it. You need to keep backups in folders that are not owned by apps which can malfunction and destroy your data. The files stored in your folders not owned by an app are not going to be lost. So hopefully you can follow what I have said as directed and avoid any future painful lessons like this. The cloud is the most reliable place to store your data, but you can't trust your documents to apps which can malfunction which is why you create a new folder and put your documents in there instead. Only once you have decided to share a document with a program do you put it into that program.
I received a telephone call from Apple's "Senior Advisor" who is helping me with this situation.
He explained that the engineering department only advised him via e-mail that engineering requests were taking "longer than expected" and there is no ETA on if/when they will look into my issue. In the meantime, my account password has been changed (cryptic) so I am unable to easily access anything on iCloud.
This is the 2nd time iCloud has either locked me out or lost data--my mistake, I should have learned the first time. Thankfully, I have a Time Machine backup so I don't think I'm out of luck (yet). Once this troubleshooting period is over, I plan to retrieve as much data as possible from iCloud, log it out, and shut it down.
Have you tried my suggestion, John? I would not give up on iCloud so easily, it is the program that malfunctions, not iCloud. Create folders that are separate from programs (you can leave an old copy of any documents in the compressed files and only put the documents you are frequently updating into the beta program folders). I would also recommend for you to get iFiles as it has an iCloud storage feature and seems to be one of the more reliable apps out there.
I appreciate the feedback and help. The app I used was Pages, so Apple designed the functionality of the application with iCloud. 😟 Moving my data to another folder defeats the purpose when all my pages documents were nice and neatly placed in their own folder.
Just spoke with Apple today, they recovered most (not all) of my data. The rep said he had no way of knowing what happened, only that the data was erased.
I've sort of given up on iCloud, switching everything to a competitor product (Google Drive).
John, I'd trust Apple more than Google. Google analyzes the text in any document you upload including emails and reports that information to third parties. I do have a Gmail account, but I rarely use it. I certainly wouldn't use it for anything confidential.
I would just like to reiterate that beta software is not necessarily a stable release. You can avoid problems in the future by being cautious with any program in iCloud that is labeled beta.
Hi crward.
The application I was using is Pages for OS X, not the beta iCloud app. Apple did recover most of the lost data but not all--there remains a discrepancy of about (33) thirty-three documents. (see below)
As to your recommendation... As for Google, I've had a Gmail/Google Apps .EDU account since my college days, all the data in Google Docs/Drive hasn't been touched since I left it so that's a good sign. In contrast, considering this is the second time I've suffered a data loss with iCloud (Sep. 2013, when iOS 7 was released), I am ready to pull the plug and move on to another service like Google or Microsoft. My wife has an Office 365 subscription and uses OneDrive (not Google) a lot, I may take her up on it--they get 1TB of storage! (I'd be lucky to use more than a GB or two.) Most, if not all, of my colleagues use Word/Office so I will likely be limping back to using Word again. I used Pages all through graduate school and beyond, no issues with the app itself; however, since Pages saves documents by default to iCloud, I had little reason to think it would less-safe on iCloud than on my own computer (HDDs crash all the time).
Moving forward, I will be advising my friends, family, and colleagues to avoid iCloud altogether.
This is what Apple recovered.... Approx. 173 documents, approximately 84% of what there originally was. (I've already moved them to Google Drive for safe keeping)
This is what was originally in there... 205 documents.
Issue is resolved.
Lost all of my Pages documents on iCloud
