All PDFs I had in my Collections in iBooks are now gone

Thanks for your tip, but that wasn't how things were for me – there was no representation of the PDFs in iBooks on my Mac under ”All Books”. Just the few iBooks I have from the book store was represented there. No sign of the PDFs except for the Collections (on the left hand side) that I had made for them.

I've now started the work of finding and re-adding all of them again and one interesting aspect is that if I copy one of the PDFs that previously was present i iBooks into ”All Books” it also gets added to the Collection it belonged to before all PDFs went missing, so the data about which PDFs belong to which Collection is still intact.

Thanks again, but I already tried that before and there was no PDFs at all. I was presented with the info that I could put PDFs there if I wanted to upload them to iCloud, as if I had never used iBooks with PDFs before. Now when I have started to re-add PDFs they show up in that folder. I will definitely make a separate backup for those files in the future in case the glitch happens again, but maybe it has been fixed (seems this ”PDFs gone from iBooks” thing has been happening for people for several years).

Yes, I know. I definitely didn't ask for it, so something out of my control/knowledge purged what I had in iBooks (talking to Apple they more or less admitted it was something on their side of things and said nothing could be done in this case).

I searched the web for ”ibooks pds disappear” and found several cases where people had experienced the same thing. Several suggested fixes and I think I've tried them all now and decided to just start over – luckily none of the PDFs I had is irreplaceable, so what I have lost is simply the time I spent on finding them since I had removed them from everywhere else than iBooks. But it's PDFs I've found online (product manual and LEGO instuctions etc.) and some for my studies which is possible to obtain again. Still sad to have spent time on thing that has to be done again, but I would of course be much worse if I lost things that couldn't be brought back.

I'm now trying to inform people about that what they have added to iBooks isn't really backup by normal means, so it's a good idea to copy the PDFs there out of iBooks too to make sure there aren't only residing in the cloud. I really think those PDFs should get backed up at least when doing an iOS backup onto iCloud.

Yes, it's a bit scary. I think it's a bit strange that people have to make their own backups of what's in iCloud, but it seems that's the best thing to do. The problem is that it isn't very straightforward to do so for some parts. I think it would be good if there was a total backup of everything one has in iCloud also stored somewhere in iCloud an accessible for a month or so (like there seems to be for contacts and deleted photos if I understand correctly.)

Oh, well. Maybe things will stabilize...

Hmm… It seems I now get a backup done of what I've added to iBooks (PDF wise) with Backblaze, which I use for offsite backup on my Mac. At least the PDFs I've added to iBooks on this computer gets backed up from: ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks

But if I add a PDF to iBooks on my iPad, will it end up synced to that folder on my computer too? I guess not, unless I download and view it on my computer.

Might be worth doing some testing here…

Sorry to hear… 😟

I don't know why it's not being addressed. Sounds like it's worth doing a proper bug report (http://bugreport.apple.com)if it's still happening to people. I'll see if I can do that – the problem is I don't have much time nowadays to follow up on reported issues.

By the way, sorry for my typos in my initial post. ”I have now idea why…” should of course be ”I have no idea why…” and ”…because I haven used…” should of course be ”…because I haven't used…”. I really think we should be able to edit posts for longer.