Don’t Look Backup In Anger

I was a new tech support worker. A customer called in angry, making demands and threats. Once they calmed down, they finally explained their issue.

This young couple had been traveling through Europe and Asia for twelve months and had documented their trip with their top-of-the-line, latest iPhone with both photos and videos, as they didn’t want to carry a heavy DSLR with them.

They have come home, logged into their iCloud account, only to find the last week of photos on their account, completely missing the majority of their twelve-month trip.

On their trip, they would take their photos and videos, and when they next found a place with WiFi, they would then upload the photos with iCloud Photo Library, wait until the Photos app status changed to ‘Updated’, and then delete all the photos in the Photos app and repeat the process. Town to town, they did this for twelve months without logging into their iCloud account to check their photos.

They believed once the Photos app showed ‘Updated’, the photos and videos were safely on iCloud, so they could delete the media to make room for more.

I went through the explanation that iCloud Photo Library is a live sync and deleting a photo from your phone deletes it from everywhere. I then had to explain we can raise an escalation for the last thirty days to see if any media can be recovered, but anything past this will not be recoverable.

The call went on for longer than it should have, as the bloke couldn’t wrap his head around it and was demanding another trip all expenses paid because if he didn’t have the photos and videos, it’s like it didn’t even happen.