iOS 10 updated deleted all iCloud Drive files in all my devices. How can I recover them?

Have you tried completely logging out of your iCloud account, waiting a few minutes, then log back in?

This has happened to me as well.

I don't check my iCloud Drive very often (it contains important but infrequently accessed files), so I only noticed yesterday that basically everything had gone.

I logged in to iCloud.com and went to the restore files area, and sure enough it's full of files that were deleted on the 13th September - the day I upgraded to iOS 10 - with 18 days left to restore them.

I've called Apple support who have been very helpful so far, and am currently awaiting an engineer to look into the problem and get back to me. I'm hoping the 1000 file restore limit on iCloud.com is an arbitrary user limit and the engineers will be able to restore everything.

Some more detail:

All of my files are gone apart from:

- The "Scanner by Readdle" folder (made by an iPhone app).

- Four PDF files which I had created in the last few months - almost as if everything older than those files was removed.

- The Preview folder containing three of the above four PDFs.

Apart from the above there is nothing - tens of gigabytes of files spanning over a decade have just gone.

Another detail: When I upgraded my phone to iOS 10 it never gave me the welcome screen or asked me to go though a set-up process. Other people I know who did the upgrade were given the welcome screen and had to enter their iCloud password etc. Perhaps missing this step caused the issue... maybe it should have triggered some kind of upgrade on my files that never happened?

Anyway, I'll post back here once I hear more from Apple. Have you managed to restore your files fsarti?

Go to iCloud.com using a computer and select Settings. When that page loads, look at the bottom left side under Advanced and see if you can restore from there.

Hi Eric, thanks but that's where I've been looking, but the Restore Files page says "Only the latest 1,000 files can be restored". See attached screenshot.

I don't want to risk doing a partial restore in case that makes it harder for the engineers to do a full restore, assuming they even can.

What happens when you 'Select All' from the image above?

How many were there in total?

Sorry I have no idea of the total number of files zinacef... it's not something I recently counted, and I'm unable to check now 😉

Apple were going to call me this afternoon, but unfortunately I was stuck on a train so had to postpone it.

fsarti, after you restored those 1000 files what does the "Restore Files" list now show? Is it now empty? I assume it hasn't added the next 1000 files... that would be interesting.

Personally I'm not touching anything until an Apple engineer has taken a look.

Was inquiring as you mentioned above that "it recovered just a 1000 files" so I was trying to determine how many was lost.

Just for fun while I wait, this is my guess at how this could have happened:

- Files on iCloud Drive are obviously stored in a certain format, metadata, etc, and that format will change over time as features are added, so they also probably have a version associated with each file so that the format can be quickly determined.

- When you upgrade to iOS 10, it probably tells iCloud to move you to the next major version of the iCloud Drive service to ensure you support some new iOS features. That can be done without needing your password, so happens during the installation.

- This new iCloud Drive version probably drops support for certain older file versions, so those files will need upgrading. But this requires your password because the data is encrypted, and therefore once installed iOS 10 should ask for your iCloud password as part of the welcome process, and then tell iCloud to upgrade the files.

- Because we were never shown the welcome screen, our files were never upgraded. Probably files created in the last few months are already compatible, hence I can still see a handful that I created recently.

- Probably iCloud Drive has some logic that says a file is considered deleted if either:

- It is marked as deleted.

- It has a version older than MINIMUM_SUPPORTED_VERSION.

Hence (almost) all our files are now magically considered deleted.

Disclaimer: I have never built a cloud storage service, the above is a complete guess 🙂

Also Apple also probably have background processes that only physically remove files from storage if they have been considered deleted for more than 30 days.

And if that's true, then I would expect Apple to be able to recover all of our files... as long as they do it within the next 16 days. I am still hopeful at this point.

Sometimes I feel apple has stopped caring for the customers who made this company one of the biggest in the world. I cannot believe what has happened to me. My business files from past 10 years have magically been erased. I was paying for this **** to store my stuff safely!!!

Amit1881 wrote:

Sometimes I feel apple has stopped caring for the customers who made this company one of the biggest in the world. I cannot believe what has happened to me. My business files from past 10 years have magically been erased. I was paying for this **** to store my stuff safely!!!

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