Silverskates wrote:
I was also told my iphone was never backed up to iCloud which I know is NOT true. iCloud shows I have 52GB of stored data & I’ve been auto paying for storage for yrs.
My 13 pro max had a sudden mysterious death 10 days ago. Worked perfectly at midnight & battery charged to 80% but at 6am it was dead, wouldn’t turn on or reboot. Tried everything. Genius Bar said many things are wrong w/it which they’d fix (I have AppleCare) but I’d lose all data on phone so didn’t have them fix (yet). iCloud support says system shows I never backed up phone… a COMPLETE mystery. Bought new 17 pro max & sync’d to old 2010 iMac (last 13 pro sync to it was Dec 2024). After iMac sync, photo album titles appear but are empty, music playlists are gone & I’m still missing all data after Dec 2024.
It’s insane no one at Apple can tell me WHY my iPhone 13 Pro Max died nor WHAT happened to all my data & WHEN. I already regret buying a new iPhone 17 pro max & I’ve lost all confidence in Apple.
By all means, buy whatever gear meets your requirements best.
As for backups, it is possible to infer from your text that you never explicitly scheduled regular iCloud backups, or that you had tried to enable iCloud backups and had no room, or that some other issue or error caused the iClpud backups to fail.
iCloud storage being nearly full is quite possibly very problematic for backups, but far from a diagnostic.
And iCloud+ storage usage doesn’t indicate whether iCloud backups were enabled.
No backups — and that for whatever reason — means no data recovery, except that already in the already-limited iCloud storage.
As for why this iPhone failed or what went wrong or why or whatever, nobody here knows.
You can pay a third-party repair provider to obtain failure details, past whatever Apple has told you, and past what Apple has indicated around the device contents being irrecoverable.
You can also try engaging a data recovery service too, but that is quite possibly both expensive and futile.
As for what you were doing with that Mac cable sync from a couple of years ago, that can sync local storage and optionally including photo sync. Or iCloud Photos can be enabled and used to sync photos from either or both the Mac or the iPhone. Details such as whether or not this is all using the same Apple Account then and now, too. In short, you’re going to have to figure out what you were doing for backups, and — if iCloud backups were enabled, or if manual cable-sync backups to the Mac were performed — why the backups failed.
You can check for photos by logging into iCloud using the same Apple Account, and look. If there are photos, it is possible to re-enable sync on devices. (I’d probably export those photos and download them elsewhere first, just to get a backup of that data. This on the off chance the sync goes sideways.)
As for your backup strategy, it would unfortunately seem you may have joined many of us as a new member of the data loss club. More than a few of us club members had neglected our backups, and have lost our data. Which reminds me. Time for another manual cable-sync backup of the devices.
