Hey there! I recently took my iPhone 16 Pro in for service because of a display issue. To back up my phone for the service, I upgraded from the free 5GB iCloud storage to a 200GB plan. However, since the upload process for my photos was taking forever, I decided to skip uploading them to iCloud and just added them to the device backup. After the backup was complete, it showed that my photo library was 67GB, which matched the actual size of my photos. I felt assured that everything would be fine when I got my phone back. Unfortunately, only the photos from my initial iCloud storage were restored, and all the others from the device backup are missing. I'm really worried because those photos include a year's worth of memories, including my graduation! What can I do to recover them?
3 Answers
It sounds like the way backups work with iCloud might be the issue here. When iCloud Photos is enabled, it syncs your photos separately, and they don’t get included in your local backups. So, since you disabled uploading, those specific photos weren’t backed up. Unfortunately, it means they're likely not recoverable unless they were stored elsewhere before the backup.
It sounds like, unfortunately, your important photos weren't included in the backup you relied on. Always good to check if iCloud Photos is on for syncing to avoid this in the future. If there's a possibility you had them synced through another method, you might still have hope!
If you didn’t wait for the iCloud upload, it means those new photos weren't saved to your iCloud account. They would only be included in the backup if you were fully synced. If you have any other backups stored on a computer or other sources, it could be worth checking those. Otherwise, it might be a tough loss.
So there's no chance of getting those missing photos back? That's really disappointing!