Help me Obi Wan Macrumors...you're my only hope!!! Truly!
I'm sorry this is so long... if you want to skip past my back story, go down to the bold font.
I'm dying here, and even though it's my own fault, I can't help but feel really upset with Apple. I'm really worried - please advise (true advice - don't just say how stupid I am please...I know this forum can be pretty mean at times)!
Back story: I never had so many problems with my old 4S and its software and just...the way things used to be. Since updating my Macbook Pro software to the latest version and same with the new phone, I somehow now have lots and lots of duplicates of photos and videos. Because of this, my laptop became maxed to its limit - no more room for most anything else, and even my iPhone with 64gb keeps telling me I'm close to filled up.
iCloud is still pretty new to me and I haven't loved it because I haven't made the time to understand it. Because of my ignorance it's been a serious PITA. E.g. constantly asking for passwords to enable or use it even if I'm not trying to use it... it's like getting phonecalls at dinner time (okay that was a weird analogy). And plus I was worried it was sending photos to my laptop that was too close to full (again: ignorance) so I monkeyed with it till it was disabled. Unfortunately because of yet more ignorance, I was afraid that if I made more room to allow backup - by moving everything or some to my external HD, and then tried moving some of it back later - it might not look right coming back, not being an Apple ext. HD. I wanted to get help at my local Mac store in doing this but life got in the way. HUGE mistake, since my last synching/backing up was in mid-October!
SO the other night I was drinking wine while watching a movie with the fam (big lesson learned here) and my 8 year-old phone thief kept trying to sneak away my phone (he keeps sneaking up behind me and watching me type in passcodes so I keep having to change them). So yet again, I right then and there put in a new passcode. The next day, I thought I remembered it (I've always memorized by visual pattern, not significant numbers) but I was wrong. Several tries later... When all was said and done, I found myself where I am now. Where is that? It's here:
I have ONE last shot. If I don't get it right, all my photos et al will be lost forever. Halloween, my b-day, my best friends' b-days, my parents' b-days, my 95 year-old grandmother's bday and her talking on video and all of us being there and she's not expected to live much longer, Christmas, and all the important pics and videos of my kids.
I had the fingerprint thing going on but that doesn't matter (thanks apple). I lock my phone every time I set it down so as not to butt-dial people but because I lock it, my fingerprints mean nothing. Stupid ***** passcode required, once again. And then again, nothing's been stored in iCloud. Did I activate the setting that makes the phone wipe clean should too many attempts be made? NO. But it's what Apple does by default, after X amount of tries. Again, thanks a lot Apple. As I'm sure many of you know, Apple doesn't wipe out all my valuable data per se, but they make it so that the ONLY option after too many failed passcode attempts is to restore the phone which is the same thing. You lose everything after your last backup. And needless to say, you can't back them up when you don't know your passcode, so it's too late to backup.
I feel like Apple should be giving a MAJOR warning to ALL customers when they first get their phones (not all of us are as tech savvy as most of you here) about what can go wrong and to what extent, if you should happen to forget your passcode and not back up regularly. I feel misled by having been fully aware of the option to set the phone to wipe clean if X amount of failed password attempts BUT KNOWING ABOUT THAT OPTION, I knew not to do that to myself for exactly this reason. It wasn't made obvious to me that it'll happen ANYWAY! I didn't expect to have so many problems with iCloud or duplicate photos filling up my devices!! Instead I was super careful not to lose or damage the phone, believing that was the only thing that could go wrong (how I'd potentially lose my valuable photos). I simply didn't know this is how Apple does things re. the passcode, the other night, when I was typing in possible codes to get into my phone. If I'd known, I would have taken it all much more seriously, gone slower and wrote each possible one down, noting which ones I've already tried, etc. If I'd known I could lose everything by forgetting my own password, I would NEVER have put in a new one without writing it down. And no, I have no clue what i haven't tried - what it might be.
I've gone as high up as I can go at Apple without hiding in the cars of their engineers and pouncing on them. I get their need to protect their customers but if their customers can prove we're who we say we are, down to tiny details about our lives, we should be able to get past this nonsense. This is awful. I feel like my only choice is to just stop using the phone and get a new phone (!) cause I can't be the one to pull the plug on these photos! DAMMMMIT! Maybe in 5 years they will have pulled their heads out of their arses and come up with a way to bypass the passcode thing, for their customers' sakes!!! And then I won't have given in and given up all those valuable photos - especially my grandma.
I KNOW it's my fault, and I'm an idiot. But does anyone have any idea what I can do? There's third party software...even the Apple rep. suggested I try that at this point (he also said to try plugging phone into a PC but that didn't work)... but from what I've read, Apple's gotten so tight on security that even third party software can't break in now. Can I just put aside my phone and get a new one, without disabling my old one? I'm sick about this. This feels really really wrong. It's one thing if something accidentally crashes or if a phone gets lost or damaged but this feels really ****** and for the first time ever makes me feel seriously ambivalent about Apple.
Thank you for reading all that...
