UKC

Morning.

My wife's iPad mini had been playing up due to the operating system being out of date (wouldn't run some apps and the browser wouldn't display certain web pages, etc).

Finally got round to taking it into an Apple shop yesterday and they have done various updates, but she seems to have lost around 5000 photos and videos - she's especially upset as they are lots of photos of the kids as babies and her late father.

She thought they were backed up in the Apple cloud and on her Mac laptop, but this doesn't appear to be the case and the Apple staff are at a loss as to where they are.

So, in desperation, does anyone have any ideas about what to look at next, please?

Hi, would an old iPad mini actually have much space/capacity for that amount of videos/pictures.

running the updates to the IoS would take more space and reduce storage on the device so this may well be the cause of them going AWOL

That's interesting - but you'd think the techies would check it has sufficient space before starting the upgrade, or that the upgrade itself would check, rather than allowing it to just randomly delete user files.

I've just written an installer for Windows that checks the available space on the target drive and won't proceed if there isn't enough.

If they were on the Mac before and you have used Time Machine on the Mac it would be worth checking the Time Machine backup to check if they are there. 

No - these were photos taken on the iPad that weren't transferred to the Mac. I thought they had been.

Bit more info. Yesterday, before updates, it said it had 19Gb of photos/videos, but didn't seem to be able to display them and the cloud had 5Gb of backup out of a possible 50Gb. Odd in itself that they didn't make sure they were backed up to the cloud, as there was plent of space.

Apple tech said to leave it overnight to complete it's updates and this morning it says no photos or videos on either the iPad or the cloud, so they've all gone!?

Stupid question but do you and your wife have an iCloud account each. Are you looking at the right account?

I believe 5gb is the limit on iCloud without paying the extra.

That’s all very strange; my experience is that Apple device will warn of insufficient space and will warn before it deletes photos. There is as I understand temp use of iCloud storage to allow updates, etc, in certain circumstances even irrespective of normal storage. If you have 50Gb with only 5 used them there should never have been a need to delete anything esp without warning.

As the updates were done in an Apple store then they should have been backed up to the system.

Long shots - in photos are they in the recently deleted section by any chance?, does she have an iphone and they were synced there?

Were the photos ever in iCloud (ie the settings were such to upload)?

If so, can you log into iCloud via the internet on another machine and look at the photos? Is so download to a different machine. If they were there, but not now, there is up to a 30-40 day window to attempt to retrieve.

As re waiting overnight  full syncing with iCloud as I discovered this year can take up to 48 hrs. Checking by logging in as above though will tell if they are actually in the cloud or not.

If they were in iCloud, but not now visible for whatever reason Apple do normally have cached versions for a period of time. I needed to give special permission (you are giving them access to see all the stored stuff which they normally have not ability to see) to Apple earlier this year to access my past versions of iCloud and delete the latest versions (ie essentially a roll roll back type exercise) to overcome a syncing fault with the latest data stored. This took them a week.

BTW, when contacting Apple support, for photo problems you really need to get it escalated somehow to the Creative Media Team support. They are the specialists and can do more than the normal support teams. To escalate my experience is you have to be patient and go through the normal support several times (3 in my case) before it is automatically escalated.

Stating the obvious, sorry given the position you are in, but backing up to a local pc is desirable imo. I’ve always copied photos from the iphone/ipad (albeit sometimes only once a year!!) just in case.

Hope you get them recovered.

Only my wife - I've never had anything from Apple, let alone an iCloud account.

Thanks for the comments. She only has a Mac laptop, no iPhone - her phone is a Samsung from work.

try this? https://www.imyfone.com/iphone-data-recovery

Thanks - that was going to be my next question...

Have you tried going to iCloud.com, signing in, and looking in Photos there?

That should be an accurate reflection of what is in the cloud (rather than what the iPad has available locally).

b

Have you tried hooking it up to the Mac , running photos and seeing what it thinks is on it.