iPhone users who uses iCloud, have you ever accidentally deleted your data such as contacts, reminders, notes, calendar or any data linked to iCloud?

Submitted by CaffeineDose t3_11djsx8 in iphone

I’m just wondering if it’s only me and the other person last week got our data disappear due to turning iCloud on or off, or that’s normal and people encounter the hard options merge - don’t merge - keep on my phone… etc and do make mistakes because they don’t understand what each option does.

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CuriousSpaceCowgirl t1_ja9dutq wrote

For this reason, I save my photos + contacts to my Google account It just makes more sense to me - once it’s in the Google cloud, I can delete from my phone without losing it forever. Unlike iCloud

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CaffeineDose OP t1_ja9g1ll wrote

So you are using iOS and relying on google cloud? Is that even possible ?

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tarzic t1_jacmvv5 wrote

I have an aunt who lost irreplacable data (thousands of photos from once in a lifetime events going back years) because she had a phone failure and was forced to restore the firmware. When she went to restore from the backup and restore the photo library to the device, she found that the blank device had backed up to the cloud and superceded the full backup from before the problem, and that 100% of the data was gone, both the photos and the backup. Genius bar told her there was nothing apple could do. Reinforced my belief that local backup is the only way

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CaffeineDose OP t1_jacrxfl wrote

I certainly agree that local backup is the way to go, I lost reminders twice and notes once. I’m glad I don’t use iCloud for images it’s way to risky to be honest. Imagine years of collection disappear in seconds. There is NO warning ⛔️ you do it accidentally and the only way to realize you made a mistake is after it happens. They don’t tell you “your data will disappear” and no one can restore them, apple support makes it worse “in my case”

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gdbjr t1_ja9pqhx wrote

Been using iCloud since it was a thing. I have never accidentally deleted data. I have intentionally deleted data when I spent a while with a pixel and didn’t want to pay for iCloud storage.

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CaffeineDose OP t1_jac1k9d wrote

So, how do you manage to keep your data, is your iCloud all the time has been turned on? I find it hard to actually bring the data back to local from iCloud. Like there is nothing you can do to get it back from iCloud.

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gdbjr t1_jacf7j8 wrote

The best way is just to never touch it. Leave iCloud on all the time and let it do its thing.

Second stop thinking that your data is in iCloud. It really isn’t. It is on your devices and iCloud is just syncing that data across your devices. So my MacBook is the keeper of that data. So if for some very odd and unusual reason you want to turn of syncing data you need to make sure that your primary device has master copy then you can turn of syncing. On all your devices.

Most iCloud data will ask you if you want to kelp the local copy before turning it off, so just make sure that device has all the updated data first.

Then should you smartly decided to reenable iCloud you start turning it back on from your primary device. It will sync up then you enable iCloud on your other devices. I have done this a few times switching between apple and google and I have never lost anything.

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CaffeineDose OP t1_jaclza7 wrote

Sounds great but the question is how to update the data in iCloud to make sure when I merge local data with iCloud it reflects the most updated data not to bring older data. My main issue is that I enabled iCloud and then it replaced current with old and so deleted the current data because iCloud wasn’t updated.

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gdbjr t1_jae8ew7 wrote

If it were me I would first make sure iCloud sync is turned off from every device I have. I would also make backups of my data where possible.

Second I would pick a single local device and make sure it has all the updated info. (How you do that I don’t have good suggestions)

Next I would log into iCloud.com and delete anything up there so there won’t be a merge, just a fresh sync

Finally I would enable iCloud on my primary device and once I confirmed it was working I would then enable iCloud on any other devices.

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CaffeineDose OP t1_jaeblk0 wrote

Will turning off iCloud delete local data?

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gdbjr t1_jaecb3k wrote

If you disable lets say disable calendar from using iCloud, you will get a pop up with options:

Keep Data on iPhone

Detele Data on iPhone

That should be the same for the other apple apps like contact and reminders.

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