How To Restore Files From iCloud (...if you're lucky!)

Check our what happened when I tried to restore my Files, Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks from iCloud...
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Transcript:
This video was going to be a demonstration of how to recover your data from iCloud. I was going to show you how you can log into iCloud, scroll down here to Data Recovery and click on each of these options to easily recover your Files, Contacts, Calendar Entries and Bookmarks. Like with any Photos you delete, iCloud should keep a copy of deleted files for 30 days in case you wish to recover them. If you’re wondering where to find your deleted photos, well they’ll either be on your device in the recently deleted album, or you can click up here on Photos in the menu and you’ll find them here too. Like with photos, Files has its own menu option and its own recently deleted folder. So if you do inadvertently delete a file that you're syncing with iCloud you should be able to find it here. That’s the theory anyway but in practice it didn’t work for me.
After a bit of Googling, I found that this used to be a fairly common issue. Several older discussion forums and websites referred to a bug in iCloud Drive which was resulting in people losing their data. This prompted Apple to develop these online tools for recovering your files. However, some people still appear to be having issues and this certainly was my experience as well.
To show you how to restore data from iCloud, I deleted a bunch of files from my iCloud Drive, then I deleted my list of contacts, and for good measure I also deleted my bookmarks from Safari and my work calendar. Now if this happens to you, the idea is that you open Safari, go to iCloud.com, and log in using your Apple ID. Now if I open up contacts you can see they’ve all disappeared as is to be expected, same as my Work calendar. That’s now gone from my list of calendars. And if I go into my iCloud Drive all those files I deleted are also gone. This proves that my iCloud account is syncing correctly with my Mac. The changes that I make on my Mac are reflected in iCloud. However, here’s where things start to fall apart. You see I would have expected those files that I just deleted to be in my Recently Deleted folder, but as you can see that folder empty. That’s a bit worrying so lets try Apple’s Data Recovery option instead. I'll click on Restore FIles, and it’s the same story here too - all my deleted files appear to be gone.
So what about the other data that I deleted? If I click on Restore Bookmarks, thankfully they all seem to be here, and I can simply select them and hit restore. And as you can see, my bookmarks instantly reappear under the address bar. So that works fine. Let’s do the same for Contacts. Now Restoring Contacts works slightly differently to Files and Bookmarks in that Apple takes archives, so rather than restoring individual contacts, you restore an archive of all your contacts from a certain period in time. I’ll choose this one because I know they were all correct at this point. Click Restore and there we are. It’s the same for your Calendar and Reminders, you restore an archive rather than individual entries. Now assuming that all worked correctly I should be able to go into Contacts and see all the contacts I previously deleted. But, as you can see, the list is still blank.
Now to be fair to Apple on this one, they do state in their support pages that restoring contacts can take up to 24 hours and this was my experience. My contacts list did eventually return about an hour after I clicked restore. So that does also work as expected. As does restoring Calendar entries, which were restored straight away along with all my appointments.
However, the same is not true for my files. I’m recording this video a week after deleting my files, and it looks like they're gone forever. My recently deleted folder is still empty and data recovery is still showing no files. One thing worth mentioning is that I don’t tend to use iCloud for syncing my files, so I had only recently moved these files to my iCloud folder. And I’m wondering whether the fact that they were only in iCloud for a few hours before I deleted them, maybe contributed to the issues that I had. That being said, there were no problems in syncing the files between my mac and iCloud, so it was only when trying to recover them that I started having issues.

[@melihciftci50]

The restore files function really saved my life. I had accidentally deleted everything on my cloud. Now it is all restored. Man I was almost going to commit suicide

[@srinivassastry1]

please assist me to recover notes that i deleted from iphone 15 and also cloud

[@Anon-y5c]

relatable rn : (

[@mahajanvanshaj120]

Bro thanx u saved me❤

[@AbhishekPatel-g9k]

where is whatsapp data sir please help on icloud not showing whatsapp data

[@Anon-y5c]

icloud just deleted all of my notes two months ago and i only recently realized i could've found it if i had logged into icloud (although unlikely since i didn't find them in any other recently deleted) anyone have a way to recover permanently deleted files? it was 4 years worth of writing :((

[@MusharrafVlogs]

How to delete restore files ..?

[@dariusade1857]

Hello sir

[@ManuManveer]

data is not recovering