iCloud payment issue: did Apple delete my backups?!

Question

Level 1

9 points

iCloud payment issue: did Apple delete my backups?!

hey there,

I'm desperately hoping that someone out there has the answer as I'm having a very tough time finding the answer online.

In mid December, my credit card information was stolen and I had to cancel the card. As I was traveling at the time, I was only able to pick up my new card on December 31st. I updated the payment information associated with my AppleID that very same day, and successfully purchased quite a number of apps on the App Store after that.

Then three days ago, I was mugged and my entire bag was stolen - including my iPhone 6 AND the new credit card. Of course I had to cancel the credit card again, and expect to receive a replacement within the next day or two. As for the iPhone, I'm still busy sorting that out with our insurance, but in the meantime I've been loaned another iPhone by a friend as that can take a while. After jumping through hoops to get a new SIM card with my old phone number, I'm trying to setup the iPhone and was expecting to be able to restore it from an iCloud backup.... BUT THEY ARE GONE!!!!

After checking my emails again, I fished this out (it is dated December 22nd):

On 22/12/2015, we attempted to charge you for your 200 GB iCloud storage plan, but there is a problem with your payment information.

Your account will be downgraded to the free 5 GB storage plan if we cannot successfully renew your subscription.


Follow the instructions below to update your billing information:

	1.	Go to Settings and tap iCloud.

	2.	Tap your name.

	3.	Tap Payment and follow the prompts.

You can also update payment information from a Mac or PC.

The iCloud Team

I've just updated the credit card information and bought 200GB worth of storage again, hoping that that will help - but much too my continued shock and horror, this has had no effect whatsoever. The backups that made up over 100GB of storage across all my devices appear to have vanished.

Does Apple delete backups if there's a payment issue??!!! This is the very first and only notification I received, and its been less than a month.... surely this can't be happening...

PLEASE HELP! I'm freaking out just a tiny bit:(

Many thanks

iPhone 6, iOS 9.1

Posted on Jan 6, 2016 12:46 PM

Reply

Answer 1

fromsouth

Level 5

4,965 points

Jan 6, 2016 5:04 PM in response to Olivia1234

it is an excellent question. Lets say I ask someone to hold something for me and pay for storage and then stop paying. So my allowance reduced to 0, does the owner of the storage have to do something in order to lose my stuff? or is it just lost? Do I deserve any grace period? what kind of grace period I deserve? a year? a day? a minute? How many warnings I am suppose to get that my account has not paid - one, five, 10? I do not know any of those answers to be honest, may be somebody who knows will chime in, but if you really want to know I would get in touch with Apple. In the mean time if you are confident that you did have backup, why don't you try to update your phone to ios 9.2 from 9.1 and see if you will be able to see those backups and restore from them after update.

Reply

Answer 2

Olivia1234 Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 1, 2016 11:15 AM in response to Csound1

Hi Csound1,

My credit card information was stolen while I was traveling and it took a week to get a new credit card. It was just incredibly unlucky that the billing date occurred the very next day after I had cancelled my credit card. I updated my payment information the day my new credit card was issued, and according to Apple Support, the charge for iCloud should have gone through shortly thereafter and access to my backups and all my iCloud data should have been restored. That did not happen.

The reality is that life happens and there could be a million reasons, sometimes an error on the bank's part even, that can cause a recurring payment to fail. I've worked in SaaS companies and have seen this happen. Imagine if every cloud provider deleted their customers' data at the first failed attempt to collect on a recurring subscription?!

Instead, what usually happens in the event of non-payment, is that access to the subscribed service is suspended - and I completely agree with that. Why should you have access to something you have not paid for right? And again usually - when and if the payment issue is rectified, and if it is within what the cloud vendor considers a reasonable timeframe (for Apple that is 30 days), then access gets restored.

At the very least, there should be more than one attempt to collect an auto-payment. The email from Apple even says 'we will downgrade you if we cannot successfully renew your subscription' - but they never tried again, despite me updating the payment information like a good girl the very second I was able to, and within a week of receiving that email.

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Answer 3

Sep 23, 2017 8:25 AM in response to Csound1

This @Csound1 user clearly doesn't have a clue on what's going on here.
Maybe he/she just skipped reading the original poster's message?
Again, for those, who are surreal: Apple deleted the whole unique precious unrecoverable archive of the original poster just because they were unable to charge his/hers freaking debit card for a few bucks.
That's nowhere near an acceptable user policy.
Apple clearly treated this man without any respect whatsoever.
Who cares about the photos of his kids when they were playing football for the first time, right?
And that stupid wedding video he made, who even needs that, gee.
Better erase it all for good, because some Apple knight said that such "excuses" must not be tolerated!
Tolerate that once and they won't be paying at all!
Because they clearly will be completely satisfied with a read-only access till the rest of their lives.
Yeah.
By the way, having read this thread now I'm clearly not buying myself extra iCloud storage because there's no guarantee my data doesn't evaporate.
I'll just go use some sane cloud backup service for that.

Or even switch my phone for completely another one.

Reply

Answer 4

Tezcore

Level 1

13 points

Feb 6, 2017 7:59 AM in response to Csound1

I assure you sir, that deleting a vast repository of an entire family's most personal and precious information, who have been long standing customers, on the back of a temporary dispute over a few dollars, is in no way an acceptable or ethically sound attitude on good business practice. There should be a reasonable sense of respect for your customers as a human being, and perhaps a grace period where your potentially life crippling valuable information should be preserved. Especially if you're familiar wth the modern storage algortithms, dedup compression, etc, then you'd realize it's hardly an impediment to anyone with large data centers like those of Apple.

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Answer 5

Csound1

Level 9

60,123 points

Mar 1, 2016 11:56 AM in response to Olivia1234

Yes, a grace period would not have been surprising, but it seems not to be available. At least now its clear that there is no grace period with Apple, stop paying and your stuff will be deleted. Plan accordingly.

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Answer 6

ceno

Level 1

12 points

Aug 21, 2017 4:05 PM in response to Csound1

You don't realise that sometimes payment problems may go beyond the customer's will. It just doesn't make sense to lose valuable data for just 1 USD - in most cases. I was in that situation, and it really *****. Just 1 dollar!

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Answer 7

LACAllen

Level 8

43,708 points

Feb 6, 2017 8:29 AM in response to Tezcore

Apple feedback goes here >>> http://www.apple.com/feedback/

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Answer 8

Eric Root

Level 10

686,775 points

Jan 6, 2016 4:10 PM in response to Olivia1234

You can also try going to iCloud.com and then select iCloud Drive. At the top right where your name is, click the dropdown menu, and select iCloud Settings. When that page loads, look at the bottom left side under Advanced and you can restore from there.

Reply

Answer 9

Olivia1234 Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 1, 2016 8:59 AM in response to Olivia1234

Hey there,

Thanks very much for your replies Eric Root and fromsouth.

Unfortunately Eric, I looked in iCloud.com and while there were just a few docs available in iCloud Drive, there were no backup files available at all.

I followed your advice fromsouth and contacted Apple support. They were as puzzled as I was that the backups were gone and very apologetic that it had happened at all. I was informed by the support guy over the phone that in the event of non payment, Apple will send out several non-payment notices alerting subscribers that there was a payment problem and to please check payment information. During this time, Apple keeps customer data stored on iCloud for 30 days after a non-payment issue.

Unfortunately however, that was not my experience. Apple Support said they would escalate the issue to engineering. Two weeks later this was the final feedback:

apologise for the late response.

Apple does not keep archives of iCloud backups.

If the iCloud backup is missing then it cannot be retrieved.

I am terribly sorry for what happened but there are not much we can do now.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

All my iCloud backups are well and truly gone 😟

I still can't believe this happened, and I don't think I will ever trust iCloud again.

Reply

Answer 10

Csound1

Level 9

60,123 points

Mar 1, 2016 9:07 AM in response to Olivia1234

If you'd paid and they deleted that would be grounds for not trusting, that you you didnt pay and then had your data deleted sounds normal. How long does anyone give away storage for free for?

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Answer 11

Csound1

Level 9

60,123 points

Aug 21, 2017 4:13 PM in response to ceno

I realize that bills have to be paid, on time, Excuses don't change that.

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