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Member since 2/9/04
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Posted on: 7/10/17 7:51 PM ET
Our son had hundreds (!!!) of photos on his iPhone and he has always backed up the pics by loading them into his windows based computer hard drive. He never used the iCloud.

Last night, he decided to turn in his iCloud to back up more recent pics there of vacation with his daughter, along with the hundreds(!!!) of other pics. Because it was taking too long, in his opinion, he panicked and turned off the iCloud access. ALL HIS PHOTOS DISAPPEARED. Into thin air. Or cyberspace. But they're not on his phone. Apple phone support told him that disrupting the iCloud loading process caused this. We understand that.

Do any of you know of a third party app he might use to find them on his phone? Or a software program for his computer where he can plus the phone into the desktop? We always hear that deleted stuff is still somewhere on our hard drives and he's hoping that's true of the phone, too.
-- Edited on 7/10/17 at 7:53 PM --
-- Edited on 7/10/17 at 7:54 PM --
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iPad's auto-correct is my enema.
  
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Posted on: 7/10/17 8:16 PM ET
Generally th folks at Apple know what they're talking about - unfortunately. But still, it's worth trying anything. Has he checked to see if they're sitting in deleted? You can retrieve photos from deleted items for 30 days. Did he email any of the photos? Those can be saved from sent emails.

If none of those, here's a link to a paid service that claims to be able to recover photos.

I'm pretty paranoid about my photos. I pay for expanded data storage on iCloud. Ninety-nine percent of them are crap but its peace of mind, I guess.

iPhone photo recovery
  
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Posted on: 7/10/17 10:29 PM ET
In reply to LifeofJanine
Thank you, Janine. I sent him that link you posted.

He had sent quite a few pics in text messages to his ex-wife and friends, so he was able to save those back to his phone. I think he said he has recaptured half old what he lost from the texts in his phone.

DS has learned a hard lesson about using & backing up to the iCloud. I lost a lot of photos when an iPhone of mine bit the dust, in pre-iCloud days, back when the cloud only saves 30 days back in time. I finally reached the limit and buy extra storage, too. Granddaughter pics are worth it.
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iPad's auto-correct is my enema.
  
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Posted on: 7/11/17 4:11 AM ET
Oh, dear. I know nothing about iPhones, but thanks for the reminder to back up our phone photos! My previous phone had practically no storage, so I was always backing up my pix, but my current one has gads and I haven't done it in about a year. Those would be all my photos of two of my dogs who have since died--don't want to lose those, for sure!
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~Elizabeth in the prairie
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Member since 5/2/09
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Posted on: 7/11/17 3:05 PM ET
In reply to Doris W. in TN
Don't have a iphone. But, since he always backed up his photos into his windows based computer's hard drive, he should still have all the photo's (in that way and form) even if he did something else, with some icloud and the iphone, and something happened he did not like, and the photo's then vanished from within the just telephone. Or some iclould out in the neither someplace. Since you can pick up and send email from most phones and most computers, if he has got photo's in a windows based computer, and wants them also on some phone now, (where they might not be anymore) I think you could always now, just email them as an attachment to yourself from some computer to some/any phone probably. I don't think that would take any special computer programs or special batch processing in particular. Might take some time and effort though, and you would probably have to do it a bunch of times, so each email message was not just too big. Maybe he does not really need all those photo's on his phone though, at all times. to have to email them back to your self there, might cause you to have to be a little more selective, which might even be a good thing, maybe?

I trust no one's cloud, or drop box anyplace actually. Does not mean I would never use something like that, but best back up is the one that only you control, and no one else can ever touch, and it seems he does have that and did that, by sticking them on his windows hard drive even, so nothing really lost either maybe?
  
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Posted on: 7/11/17 5:58 PM ET
In reply to beauturbo
What he lost are the photos he took over the past ten days while on vacation, since he was out of town and the computer was home. But youré right, he has retrieved and saved the ones he sent out in text messages. He told me, last night, that he is happy enough with what he managed to harvest.

DS tried a free version of a photo recovery software, but it showed all his photos in very random order that made no sense to him. Since he recovered enough of the latest photos from his text messages, he did not feel the need to get the pay version of that software to retrieve them through it.

I agree, no cloud is hacker-proof or iron-clad safe. But it does serve a purpose until one can get home from a trip and back up the photos. After all, smartphones can unexpectedly fail.

The last time I was at the Apple store for something, and a woman next to me was there because her iPhone would not boot up. Nobody knew why, but it was "dead as a doornail." She lost everything --- contacts and ..... ALL her photos from her child's recent wedding --- because the phone would not boot up, and she had never ever turned on the iCloud. I really hurt for her. A painful lesson learned.
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iPad's auto-correct is my enema.
  
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Posted on: 7/11/17 6:33 PM ET
I'm glad your son has recovered what is most valuable to him.

I am also wondering about recovering the pics he saved to his Windows hard drive. Those should all be intact.

I get very nervous about this very subject. I have an Android phone, not an iPhone, and I do back up the phone pictures to Google photos (our equivalent of iCloud), but it doesn't back them up at full resolution, so I also back up my images from my phone to my laptop hard drive, AND I back up the images from my laptop to a removable hard drive. It's a 2-step process and I do it every so often, particularly before going on vacation, etc.

Still, nothing is 100% secure.

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Member since 4/6/03
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Posted on: 7/11/17 6:43 PM ET
Have him use a computer to go to his iCloud account online. (dont even involve the iPhone at this point). He should be able to see what, if anything, he has saved in the cloud. If he's lucky, its all still there.
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Ana, the ripper
  
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Posted on: 7/11/17 7:15 PM ET
In reply to anae
He has never saved anything to the iCloud before Sunday night. Disrupting the uploading process made it all go ... "poof!" So there was nothing there. Good thing his older stuff is on his desktop and also an external hard drive.
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iPad's auto-correct is my enema.
  
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Posted on: 7/11/17 9:30 PM ET
In reply to Doris W. in TN
Oh sorry. I thought he might have had one because I never signed up for one either. I had an apple ID account and then when they started promoting icloud they gave me icloud account with the same passowrd automatically.

Other than the 'Recently Deleted' photo album (which sits at the end of the list of all the other normal photo albums on the phone - and hangs on to deleted photos for 30 days, just in case) there is no place I know of for deleted photos to hide on an iphone.
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Ana, the ripper
  
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