Lost old videos from iPhone 6 and icloud

[Kate123]

Hi.
I wondered if anyone could help please? I noticed today that a number of videos spanning from 2010 until 2012 are lost from my phone and iCloud. They are sentimental to me and I know I have not deleted them myself. I have been in touch with Apple who haven’t been able to help me but they can’t have just disappeared en masse. I wondered if iOS upgrades might have affected my photo app and caused them to be lost?

if anyone has any ideas as to how and if I can get them back I’d be really grateful. Thank you.

 

[scifan57]

The only way to get them back would be if they were in a backup of your iPhone made before they went missing.

 

[J. A.]

Can you find them in the Recently Deleted album?

If you used iCloud for these videos, they are not included in a backup. So it won‘t be possible to recover them, if they are not in Recently Deleted.

 

[Kate123]

Thank you for your replies. I’m sorry for my tech ignorance but I thought iCloud was a safe back up before doing anything with your device? I had everything backed up to iCloud before I downloaded any new iOS upgrades. If nothing is safe in iCloud please could you tell me what is the best way to protect everything in future? I don’t have a computer just an iPhone and iPad. I’ve also seen there are phone rescue options that say they can retrieve lost data post IOS upgrade, particularly iOS 12. Thank you for your help.

 

[J. A.]

iCloud doesn’t backup your images, it syncs them between all the devices that are connected to it. When you remove them from one device, they also disappear from the other devices.

To make sure you don’t lose them, load them to one or two different apps and store them there, or save them to a USB flash drive or hard drive.

The rescue options you mentioned need a backup with the lost images included, afaik, so this won’t help when you’re using iCloud Photos.

 

[Kate123]

Thank you, I’ll back up from now on. I’m still really unsure why they’ve disappeared because I know they weren’t manually deleted. I do suspect an iOS update glitch but I can’t seem to do anything about it sadly.