A teacher wanted to restore the backup of his iPad after six months. However, the data has been deleted by Apple in the meantime. He’s now commenting on this on Twitter.
Nobody wishes what happened to Erin Sparling. The teacher from New York lost all of his data on the iPad – despite a backup in the iCloud. On twitter tells the person concerned how exactly this could happen.
Actually, the backups of Apple devices on the iCloud are convenient. They are made regularly and, above all, automatically and when you put a new device into operation, you can easily restore all of your data with little effort.
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180 days deadline
However, the backup copies are not saved for eternity, as the US teacher Erin Sparling had to find out himself. Because the data is deleted after six months – without warning. Apple noted this in a support document: “iCloud backups are available for 180 days after you turn off iCloud backup or stop using it.”
In other words: If you do not make any more backups, you will lose your previously backed up data. That happened to the teacher. He had reset his iPad and then gave it away to give to someone who might need it for class during the Covid pandemic. Six months later, Sparling bought a new tablet from Apple. When he tried to restore his backup, it could no longer be found.
“Ten years are gone”
«I had made a lot of drawings with the iPad. Ten years of work are now simply gone, ”explains Sparling in frustration. And further: «A service that has backup in its name implies a long storage of the data. My expectation as a customer is that if I pay to have my data saved, it will also be saved, ”says Sparling.
Although Sparling also explains on Twitter that his case is rare, he is not unique. So it happened to Walter Ian Kaye. He had saved the data from his old iPad on the iCloud. He also paid for the storage space (200 GB). Then the iPad broke. When he saved several months until he had enough money to buy a new device, the backup was deleted. “It would be advisable if Apple would send an email beforehand and explain that its own backup will be deleted in 14 days,” wrote the Apple news site Tidbits.com. It would be even better if the so-called delete counter could be reset with just one click.
