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Bug in iOS 8's 'Reset All Settings' Option Also Erases iCloud Drive Documents

austinapple said:
Before anything else, let me first say that I am and have been a dedicated Apple customer for most of my life. Despite my being upset with this situation, my loyalty still does (and likely always will) lie with apple. That said, I need this fixed. Now.

The issue of iCloud deleting documents has been going on for months—and Apple has generally been ignoring it. Searching back through my email, I discovered that I had first contacted Apple about iCloud data loss in late July, immediately after installing the Yosemite beta.

Following a number of AppleCare calls and countless customer relations representatives, I was told in early August that the years of Pages and Numbers documents I had saved to iCloud (including old college papers, my resume, and projects for work—literally hundreds of documents) had vanished completely. I couldn't find them. Apple's engineers couldn't find them. God couldn't find them.

Apple then told me to retrieve them from my Time Machine backup. Sounds like a solution, right? Wrong. While I back up to Time Machine religiously, iCloud documents apparently do not save to Time Machine backups, probably because they are saved to Apple's own servers, not my hard drive. After a few rounds of phone tag, Apple finally declared that the loss was my own fault and that Apple cannot be held responsible because I hadn't backed up my iCloud documents manually. Let me restate that for clarity: Apple faulted me for trusting their own cloud backup service housed on their own servers, insisting that I should have thought to backup all of my documents manually by downloading each one from iCloud.com and saving them elsewhere (even though they initially recommended I use Apple's automated backup application—which I was already using—Time Machine).

So despite there being absolutely no indication my iCloud documents were at risk, or that my Time Machine backup wouldn't suffice as a backup, Apple decided they are not responsible for my loss. Subsequently, their solution to this egregious error and literally devastating loss was to send me a complimentary external hard drive to use with Time Machine—a "solution" I had been implementing both before and after the issue, and one that we had already established does nothing to prevent this from happening again. The irony.

Two months later, my documents are still nowhere to be found. So much for the spreadsheet of which friends owe me money or my resume.

The bottom line is that this issue has been occurring since before the release iOS 8 and can also plague anyone associating their iCloud Apple ID with the Yosemite beta. Furthermore, Apple has taken no responsibility for the data they've lost, instead sheepishly jumping through the loophole of the "beta." While I hope nobody suffers this kind of data loss, I do hope the influx of similar cases inspires Apple to take action and stop blaming the customers.

P.S. While my documents are still missing, iCloud Drive now shows each folder I had created within Pages, just without any documents in them. So that's fun.
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Truly and utterly atrocious. I can't believe how bad Apple is at cloud services.
 
I've had the same issue happen to me. I called Apple support yesterday and they put my account in trouble-shooting mode whilst they investigate the issue.

One surprising thing is that they asked me to the change the password for my Apple iD (appleid.apple.com) presumably so they can access affected areas of my account. However after doing this, it's now possible to use two passwords (my old one that I changed) and the new one I was told to change it to by the Apple Rep.

Has anyone else whose account has been put in Trouble-shooting mode noticed the same happen to them? It's extremely disconcerting that my old password still works to access my Apple ID...

Note however, that all my actual devices are not accepting the old password anymore...
 
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Boom!

… or is it now “Poof!”?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y38Sb3FOYmY :cool:

And no, I am not a troll. Being a longtime Apple fan (I switched in 2003!), I'm appalled at their track record as of late, and can't even fathom the amount of joking by many of my (arguably trollish) Android/PC-loving, Apple-bashing friends that I'll have to endure.

This is plain inexcusable, and I actually feel my credibility to be at stake. To think that just a few weeks ago I was extolling iCloud…

Apple, get your act together and implement both local (easily accessible, that is; not all users are geeks with a penchant for dabbling in the now hidden by default Library folder) and server-side iCloud Drive Time Machine already (and no, making us wait for OS X 10.11 or iOS 9 to get that doesn't cut it, in order to restore user confidence we need that STAT)!

Dropbox has it (though the UX is far from perfect, it works) and integrates nicely with iOS and OS X (with older versions even, unlike iCloud Drive – which, coincidentally, integrates with Windows versions older than the latest supported OS X version… go figure!), so there's really no excuse for them not to follow their lead.
 
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Safe route for iCloud-enabled devices

I just successfully reset my iCloud Drive enabled iPad, holding over 200 iWork documents. Nothing was lost and everything is still where it should be on all other devices.

To be really safe in case something happened, I did a full backup of everything I could get my hands on. My method will work without this backup, but just to be safe..:

- Do a full iCloud backup
- Do a full iDevice backup on a computer (even pulling the documents from the individual apps in the Apps tab in your iDevice under iTunes)
- Transfer all purchases to your iTunes on your computer.
- Backup everything else that might not have been backed up with the free recovery-tool deTune (for music, podcasts, purchases, movies aso.)
- Go to iCloud.com, log in with your Apple ID that is used on your iDevice and download all iWork documents (you can select all and do a mass-download). I did this with all documents in pairs of 8 (easier and safer).

When you are finished with that, follow these steps to reset the iDevice without loosing your data in iCloud and on other devices:

The trick is to manually go through the steps that the "Reset All Settings" button would do, in the safest order possible in Settings.

- Deactivate iMessages and Facetime
- Deactivate iTunes and App Store
- In Pages under Settings directly: deactivate iCloud Drive
- In Numbers under Settings directly: deactivate iCloud Drive
- In Keynote under Settings directly: deactivate iCloud Drive
- Delete Pages, Numbers and Keynote (the apps themselves on the home-screen)
- In iCloud deactivate all switches individually and always use "Keep the data on my device" (Notes, Contacts, Calendar aso.)
- In iCloud under iCloud Drive deactivate all apps listed
- Deactivate "Find my iPhone/iPad"
- Deactivate iCloud Drive
- When everything else is switched to off and deregistered and there are no Apps left on the iDevice that use iCloud (all deleted from the home-screen): deactivate iCloud (deregister the iDevice from iCloud)
- Put your iDevice into DFU mode and have it restored with iTunes at a computer

--> Full and safe reset of all settings and even data. Everything that was in iCloud stays in iCloud and on all other connected devices. Nobody that buys/gets your iDevice can receive iMessages or Facetime calls, access your iCloud documents or deactivate your iDevice remotely. Success!
 
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I know this makes me a terrible person, but as some one who loathes the current implementation of the cloud (idea/paradigm) this is freaking hilarious. :apple:
 
Has anyone had this problem with the latest Yosemite GM? I know it's still technically beta but perhaps this has been fixed?
 
scionfriar said:
If you're referring to Time Machine backing up iCloud Drive, then no, it hasn't been fixed.
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Thanks. Dumb (?) question. What if you take out the SIM and turn off wifi before Resetting all Settings and Content? Would that not solve the problem?
 
I was told by an Apple employee not to enable iCloud Drive until Yosemite is out. It seems the whole iCloud Drive is half baked and not worked out yet. This is yet another example.
 
Is this deleting of iCloud documents only occurring with devices that enabled icloud drive?
 
I just left the apple store after having one of their own techs do a reset on my phone after a failed registration. When I went to restore my settings from iClloud all of my icloud history was removed. This was a new phone out of the box running iOS 8.0.

I do not have iCloud drive enabled yet. I'm waiting to hear back from a tech but this is completely unacceptable. Not only that but it appears their own techs have not even been informed of this bug.

If you are going to reset your phone I suggest backing up to itunes before doing anything drastic.
 
I spoke to apple support on the phone. They were able to verify my iCloud backups were still in tact. After doing a 3rd full reset (I had done 2 myself) before talking to support my backups magically showed back up, and I was able to restore everything from my iCloud.
 
Yes. I had the same thing happen to me. A few days ago I opened my iPad and it said iCloud was available for pages, etc and it all loaded back up.
 
jedifaka said:
Why bring Microsoft into this? Their O365 platform is growing like crazy, serves operating systems and devices from anywhere, and doesn't arbitrarily delete data.
It's the difference between a hobby and ready-for-enterprise.
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Just because something is popular, doesn't make it good.

Microsoft is the swiss cheese security of operating system and web services. I rather lose data, than having Microsoft hand my data over freely to the NSA and get paid for doing so.

I guess you haven't lost a ton of research from Word crashing.

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AppleP59 said:
To be fair, this guy looks as if he could bend more than a phone, if he were to sit on it
Image
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He looks like a guy that would retrofit a gun holster for his 6 plus.
 
I am one of the first people to mention this iCloud wipe weeks ago (it appears I even even quoted in the article, but out of context). I lost all of my iWork documents due to this bug. Fortunately, I had a pre-Yosemite Mac which still held my iCloud documents in the temporary folder and was able to retrieve copies. I simply copied them to another folder with plans to reimport them to iCloud once I updated to Yosemite.

Well, today I open Pages on my iPad and watch in astonishment as my old documents slowly trickle back into view. I open Numbers and the same thing happens. To be absolutely clear, my iCloud was completely wiped. The web interface showed no documents, just empty folders. I did not, in any fashion, put my missing documents anywhere near iCloud since they were erased. I didn't even contact Apple support. Apple must have done something on their end to retrieve the documents automatically.

Anyone who has lost data to this, check your iCloud drive and see if the same good fortune has occurred for you.
 
I called Apple Support about this and they forwarded it to the engineering team. A week later I received an email saying that they were unable to recover my documents.

I then dropped an email to tcook@apple.com about it, and while I've not received a reply, all of my documents seem to have reappeared :D
 
My account was in troubleshooting mode for several days. Late Monday evening, I opened up my Macbook Air and all my documents were back.

I contacted the advanced support specialist the next day and he was surprised and said that he hadn't heard anything heard anything from the engineers.

So, I'm not sure what the deal is...but my files are magically back.
 
Yep mine too. 2 days after being told they were unrecoverable. Seemingly nothing to do with Apple engineers. Can anyone explain this??
 
scionfriar said:
My account was in troubleshooting mode for several days. Late Monday evening, I opened up my Macbook Air and all my documents were back.

I contacted the advanced support specialist the next day and he was surprised and said that he hadn't heard anything heard anything from the engineers.

So, I'm not sure what the deal is...but my files are magically back.
Click to expand...

how do you get to speak to those?
 
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