My apple ID seemed to vanished/deleted after being unused for quite some time

You are correct. Apple removes IDs from its database if it is not used for a long period (2 years?). This would be a serious problem if you wanted to revive an iOS device that had iOS 7 or higher (with activation lock). But in your case, with a new device, just establish a new ID. Why do you want to revive the old one?

You can go to this link and see if you can find the ID listed after supplying the info you are prompted for: FORGOT APPLE ID.

Type in the email address that you think the old Apple ID used to see if it will display for you.

Cheers,

GB

Regretfully this is not true. My wife had this problem with her iPhone 4S. She changed the ID for her phone when it was using iOS 6 (pre-activation lock) but did not change the ID for iCloud. Now the Phone keeps on asking for the iCloud password for the old ID, but entering it (we know it) does not work. We spent an hour with an Apple Genius at an Apple store, but he confirmed that the old ID was gone. So yes, Apple deletes old IDs after about two years, there is nothing you can do about this.

Not sure what issue you are describing, but you have been misinformed about the Apple ID.

Can you provide more information? When you indicate that she changed the ID for her phone, do you mean that she changed her existing Apple ID to a new email address, or that she created a brand new Apple ID?

When you say that she did not change the ID for iCloud, not sure what you mean by that? Are you indicating that she did not sign out of iCloud on the phone before changing the ID?

Once I have a better understanding about what exactly occurred regarding the original ID, and what occurred regarding iCloud we can try to get this straightened out.

And again, it practically takes an act of Congress to get any Apple ID deleted.

Best of luck,

GB

Probably. Before they made this change, you had to go to your Apple account, and change the Apple ID back to the original email address without verifying it. Then sign out of iCloud on the device. Then change the ID back to the current ID and validate, and sign back in to iCloud with the updated ID. However, the new Apple account processing, requires the email address to be verified. When that update went into place, the change to the process also went into place. Much, much easier now! 🙂

Glad you are all set now!

Best of luck,

GB

The Apple ID has purchases tied to it that would be lost if a new ID had to be created. Apple does not delete Apple IDs at any point unless specifically requested by a customer and then only if there has been a security or hacking issue with the ID.

Cheers,

GB

«Can you provide more information? When you indicate that she changed the ID for her phone, do you mean that she changed her existing Apple ID to a new email address, or that she created a brand new Apple ID?» When she left her job nearly 3 years ago, she changed the email address associated with her Apple iPhone 4S from her work email to a personal one. We followed the instructions on the Apple Knowledge base, removing the old email and substituting the new one. The backup ID, a personal one, remained the same. Note that this change was made under iOS 6 (or earlier?) before the existence of Activation Lock.

«Are you indicating that she did not sign out of iCloud on the phone before changing the ID?» Correct. Note that the backup method was set to iTunes on her home computer, not to iCloud.

The phone worked fine. All the apps and data carried over. Find my iPhone worked to locate the Phone and Play a sound. She never used iCloud for any purpose. Contacts were backed up to her computer. BUT every once in a while (and every time the iOS was upgraded) a pop up showed up asking for the password for the old ID. One of the choices was "NOT NOW" which she always checked, not to be bothered by this weird request. The phone then continued to function normally. Subsequently, the phone was upgraded to an iOS that had activation lock. As I noted the Find My iPhone worked correctly with her current email address ID. At some point, I suggested to her that she remove this problem by inserting the password (which she had written down in two places). But the Phone would not take the password. Attempting to remove the iCloud account resulted in a request for the old password which was not accepted. A request to Apple to send the password for the old ID to the recovery email address resulted in a reply that no such Apple ID existed.

I tried to get help for her problem on the iPhone board, but received no replies, so we made an appointment at the Genius bar. The Genius spent a lot of time with us. He confirmed the problem, but could not figure out a solution. He did not want to wipe the phone clean, because he said that doing that very occasionally bricked the phone, and, in any case, there would be no benefit, because when we did a restore from backup, the problem would probably be restored as well. He concluded that Apple had removed the ID from its database as it hadn't been used for a long while and the email address attached to it no longer existed. He concluded that it was best leaving things as they were.

It is based on this conversation (and the facts on which it was based) that I made the postings in this thread. Anything to further enlighten me would be greatly appreciated.

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OK, so the Apple ID that is currently signed onto iCloud on the device is the same Apple account but it is the previous email address used for that Apple account, correct?

If that is correct, then she should be able to sign out of that "version" of the Apple ID by using the current password that that Apple ID is using.

Up until about 4 months ago, the solution was a bit more involved, but Apple apparently made some changes so that if the Apple account is the same one but is just using an updated ID, you can sign the old version of the ID out of iCloud with the current password.

The reason it said that the Apple ID for the old email didn't exist is because it didn't. The Apple account that used that old ID had been updated with the new ID, so, the old email address would simply not have been found as an Apple ID anymore since it wasn't.

Try signing out the iCloud account with the current password for that Apple account. If you have issues, please post back and let me know what problems you are running into.

Cheers,

GB

GB,

Thanks so much. It worked. We signed out with the old name, signed in with the new, and then used iTunes to switch back from iCloud to iTunes backup. We did try this approach before, both at home and with the person at the Apple store. It didn't work then, but I guess that was before Apple made the change you mentioned..