iCloud data disappeared - make sure to back up

[yg17]

Posting this here to serve as a warning for everyone else who's using iCloud to store important documents. My Numbers and Pages documents disappeared off iCloud sometimes over the last week. I called Apple and talked to a rep who sent it to engineers to investigate and see if they can restore it, and I just heard back from the rep. The data is gone. Poof. Disappeared into thin air. Those documents were there one day, gone the next.

Apparently the onus was on me to have local backups, which, frankly, seems like bull **** because iCloud is a service I pay for (yes, I pay for extra storage) and I would've expected Apple to have backups of customer data. Granted, I expected my data not to disappear into the ether either, but I guess my expectations were too high.

So this just serves as a warning, if you have anything in iCloud you don't want to lose, back it up locally as iCloud might not be as safe and secure as one would think.

 

[Rigby]

iCloud (and other similar cloud services) are not meant as backup solutions. Backups should also protect against user error. In iCloud, if you delete a document by mistake, or erase some of its content, it's gone and cannot be brought back. A backup should be entirely separate from the live files and ideally keep several generations.

 

[yg17]

I wasn't using iCloud as a backup solution. I was using it for primary storage - the way it seems the apps are designed, with enough trust in Apple that my documents wouldn't just one day disappear. I know I wasn't protected against user error, I had enough confidence and trust in myself to not delete a document or mess something up beyond the point of repair, and never did in the 2 years I've been using iWork to save documents to the cloud.

Perhaps my mistake was not having backups locally - which the iWork apps do not offer, would it be hard for them to save a local copy every time you change a document, but the big mistake I made here is assuming my documents were safe on iCloud. And basically, what Apple is telling me is the line from Animal House..."You ****ed up. You trusted us."

 

[biosci]

So there is no 'backup' per se for iCloud? Once it's gone, it's gone? I came here because I have actually been having some issues with iCloud sync... Multiple conflicts even though the apps on other devices are off.

 

[Rigby]

Perhaps my mistake was not having backups locally - which the iWork apps do not offer

If you had made regular backups of your hard drive (e.g. using Timemachine), you would be able to retrieve the documents from the "Mobile Documents" folder in the backup, which is where iCloud-synchronized files are kept. iCloud is by no means a replacement for backups.

 

[yg17]

If you had made regular backups of your hard drive (e.g. using Timemachine), you would be able to retrieve the documents from the "Mobile Documents" folder in the backup, which is where iCloud-synchronized files are kept. iCloud is by no means a replacement for backups.

1. I use TimeMachine
2. Most of the docs I only opened on my iPad or iPhone so they are not on my Mac in that folder. I checked.

 

[Rigby]

1. I use TimeMachine
2. Most of the docs I only opened on my iPad or iPhone so they are not on my Mac in that folder. I checked.

They are not now (because they somehow got deleted from iCloud, which means they have been deleted on all computers and devices synced using that iCloud account). But they should be in your earlier backups, provided you had iWork installed and iCloud activated.