iCloud isn’t really great

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Level 1

9 points

iCloud isn’t really great

One year back my iPad ran out of storage. Later I purchased 50gb for my iPad. After a couple months I switched back to the 5gb plan. Then I lost all of my storage and it went back to only having 5gb. Now I finally decided to just clear up some of the space I was using. I deleted maybe 50 photos and went back to check how much storage I had. I go back to the photos app and see that I had lost at least 1,200 photos. In one minute all my photos were lost and the ones it deleted were mostly important photos. Now I have only a couple photos left. I don’t really like taking photos anymore knowing that I just lost 1,200 photos and those photos are probably going to be deleted anyways.

iPad Air Wi-Fi, iOS 10.3.3, No

Posted on Nov 16, 2017 1:43 PM

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Answer 1

zinacef

Level 10

88,407 points

Nov 16, 2017 2:03 PM in response to ΓΞΠ

iCloud is a synchronization service which syncs all of your data across all of you device, making them immediately available to you. Delete that data on one device, and it's deleted everywhere.

iCloud is not your traditional cloud-based/archival service like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos, etc.

When you deleted your photos, thinking iCloud was like an archival service, when really it's a synchronization service, you essentially deleted the photos everywhere (iCloud and all devices). If the photos are in the Recently Deleted folder, great for you as you can retrieve them. However, if they're not, then bad for you as they are lost.

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Nov 17, 2017 10:41 AM in response to ΓΞΠ

The loss may have occurred because you had all your photos synced to iCloud. When you downgraded back to 5GB, data, to include photos, in excess of 5GB was deleted.

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