Photos / iCloud spontaneously deleted 24,000 of wife’s photos! (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

Details hopefully to come, but in trying to sync her photo library to iCloud, somewhere around 24,000 to 32,000 photos have vanished from my wife’s Mac.

Fortunately she’s got Time Machine, BackBlaze, and SuperDuper (but come to discover SD hasn’t run it’s biweekly update since September!). So we all the photos should be recoverable.

And she’s already got a twice elevated support call due from Apple on this iCloud Photo Library snafu. They’re going to get an earful when they call back.

 

[Clinton McClure]

Reason #1 that I don’t use any cloud service for backup. Reason #2 is I don’t have the bandwidth for it. I rely instead on a backup image whenever I make a major OS change and file backups whenever I add new music to iTunes (plus a duplicate of the above maintained offsite) combined with Time Machine. I understand the intent of a cloud-based backup solution but I’ve personally experienced nothing but grief from them on both the Mac and Windows platforms.

I hope Apple support can sort out everything and nothing was lost.

 

[Johnny Angell]

Let us know what the resolution is.

 

[DaveF]

Still waiting
A senior Apple support person was supposed to call last week, but didn’t.
And my wife and I haven’t had time to look into it further this week

 

[Ted Todorov]

I am having a problem as well:
Photos on my iPad Pro stopped loading the photo stream from iCloud - i.e. my new iPhone photos as of couple of weeks ago stopped appearing on my iPad. I need to call Apple Care, and I still haven't. (Photos taken on my iPad do make it to other devices, so the block seems to be in one direction only.)

There clearly appear to be bugs in iOS 11/High Sierra/iCloud that did not exist before.

Also, my (top of its line, Late 2013 MacBookPro) can't play h265 video (aka HVE) which is what current iPhones 8 or 10 shoot (it will play a downgraded version).

The good news is that the current AppleTV does play your 4K h265 videos without complaints - but I have no idea if it is downrezing and simply not mentioning it.

 

[DaveF]

Apple said, in short, she’s not running the latest version of macOS so iCloud syncing isn’t compatible. If she wants to upgrade they can help further.

She’s going to recover her photos from Time Machine.

I’m going to call Apple to cancel and be refunded for the $10 / 2TB storage.

And maybe we’ll try again when that iMac can be upgraded to High Sierra.

 

[DaveF]

Wife did Time Machine to recover missing photos that vanished during iCloud snafu.

I'm on phone with Apple technical support to get iCloud storage downgraded from 2TB to 200GB and get refund. (Downgrade can be done easily by user through preferences. But tech support told us to call support to do it to get refund.)

Whenever my wife upgrades to the current macOS, we'll try again the photos cloud library.

 

[DaveF]

One chat, two phone calls, six advisors at four different levels, and an hour later, I got my refund.

It also completely disabled my iCloud storage. But I immediately renewed the 200GB plan, and nothing was lost. (I think you get a few days or a month to upgrade before data is deleted.)

Whew!

 

[Mark Booth]

A dedicated hard drive for photos, a Time Machine backup of that photos drive, plus a 3rd hard drive backup (SuperDuper) of the photos drive kept in a fireproof safe beats CLOUD backup EVERY time. I also have older drives that have photos on them as older backups of my earlier photos. I have like 6 copies of photos that are older than 2 years.

Mark

 

[Ted Todorov]

So my iPad Pro input from iCloud photo stream problem was fixed - courtesy of a very long AppleCare call, where I got a connected to one of the more advanced people, after the initial person couldn't fix it. Basically I had to disconnect Photos on all of my devices (iPad Pro/iPhone/MacBook Pro) from iCloud and then reconnect it (can't remember the exact order) - the result was a new backup to iCloud from all devices, and once that was done, streaming to all devices including the iPad Pro was working fine.

While I certainly wish the problem hadn't happened in the first place, the AppleCare support was first rate - they understood everything precisely - I never had to explain anything or argue with them to not waste time on things I had already tried or did anyway.

 

[KeithAP]

Apple said, in short, she’s not running the latest version of macOS so iCloud syncing isn’t compatible. If she wants to upgrade they can help further.

So in short, Apple makes all hardware and software involved and allowed iCloud syncing of photos even though it is not compatible/has problems?? Apple is a hollow shell of what they use to be.

-Keith