iPad Crisis Help Request

[Lvmymacs]

I know, I know. I should probably scour the forum and past threads before posting. But, I've just spent 3 hours on the phone with Apple Care. I can barely type this thread, much less try to read others for comprehension.

So here's my story.

I love to write. And travel. And as much as I love my Macbook Pro, it is a bit weighty for airport security lines.

I purchased my iPad Pro almost exactly a year ago and found it to be a glorious thing. All was well with the world until just a month ago when I finally upgraded to 11.2.2.

All my writing documents simply vanished from Pages.

Having faithfully backed up to iCloud regularly, I didn't panic. But, when I looked there it said 0 documents.

Apple Care informed me that there's a difference between backing up and syncing. And the Cloud and iCloud Drive. O silly me.

I was told that the only option was to reset the iPad, erasing everything, and then restore it from the Cloud with a previous backup containing my work.

This has failed. Still 0 Pages documents. Still photos that weren't on the iPad at the time of the backup we restored from. Interestingly, many songs are missing from iTunes. I'm not worried about that. All my songs are on my Macbook and the external drive I back that up to.

But I need my iPad Pages documents. I never synced those to my Macbook (hindsight being what it is....)

I know there is a real depth of knowledge on this forum. If anyone has ideas before I log more time with Apple Care, I would appreciate it.

 

[akadafni]

sounds like maybe you were saving the documents to the device and not iCloud. Did you sign in to icloud.com from the Mac to see if the files are there? Did you check the restore feature from icloud.com setting? Would save you having to erase the device. Are you signed into the correct iCloud account on the iPad?

 

[mofunk]

If you Pages are important then you have to back them or sync to your MBP. I've had this happen to me once and realized after losing everything that I have to have more than one source of backing up files. Since you are traveling you can also pick up a jump drive and back them up that way. Another option is saving Documents to Dropbox.

You could log into your iCloud account on Safari and see if its there? But probably not.

Just chalk this up as a learning lesson...back up to more sources.

 

[Abazigal]

Sounds like some sort of reverse syncing happened. Like the update caused a brand new version of pages (with no documents) to be seen as the latest version, which in turn proceeds to delete all other documents stored in iCloud to match it.

It did happen to a colleague of mine with dropbox (long story short, he wanted to sync his dropbox file contents to a new laptop of his, but it somehow ended up deleting everything in dropbox), but I can't say I have any personal experience with it.

 

[Newtons Apple]

Always do an encrypted iTunes backup. I use the cloud daily but want a hard copy in my computer if your data is important.

 

[Eric5273]

I use the Documents by Readdle app, and twice per month I take all my files stored in iCloud and use the Documents app to zip them into a single large zip file, and then I save that zip file to my Microsoft OneDrive. That way I have backups going back every 2 weeks for the recent past. Then at the end of the year, I delete the oldest ones keeping only one every few months. You could do this with any cloud storage such as Dropbox. What is nice is that this backup solution does not require a Mac or PC and can be done with only the iPad.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Did the folks at AppleCare send you to iCloud.com > Settings > Advanced > Restore Files?

If the documents were in iCloud Drive, then even if inadvertently deleted, you may to be able to recover (if too much time has not elapsed).

One of the challenges when traveling is making sure you connect to wifi and can both backup and sync to iCloud when connected.

However, 0 documents is not a matter of failing to backup/sync the most recent documents. Something may have been amiss in your iCloud settings/login from the start.

Going forward, it pays to sign into the iCloud.com web site from time to time, which is the final arbiter of what's in iCloud. If you don't see what you expect to see, there's some troubleshooting to be done.

 

[Lvmymacs]

Thanks for the feedback.

They did not send me to iCloud.com > Settings > Advanced > Restore Files

I'm on hold with them again now, so will look at that while I'm holding.

They confirmed that they could see the back ups to the Cloud, one of which we tried to use to restore the iPad.

Hopefully, something will work.

I'm not ready to give up yet.

But I do consider this a lesson learned.