A family member is in the hospital and needs help with iPhone/iPad photos and contacts.
She reports that the iPhone (roughly a model 6-8) was ‘not working right’, gave it to a family member who is reported to have reset it to default settings. Seems a new physical SIM was put in (same phone number) and it is working again for calling, mobile data, and WhatsApp.
She doesn’t have much idea about iCloud, what it is, how it works etc but says photos taken on iPhone in the past appeared on the iPad (curved back, large bezel model) so apparently some iCloud use was there. She has a PC laptop of some kind, don’t know if she ever synced to that.
Post new SIM there were 3 recent photos and maybe 20 Contacts but she says there was a lot more in both. I logged in to her iCloud with my iPad mini and the same photos and contacts were there.
Both devices were given to her ‘Apple Friend’, a guy who has ‘everything Apple’ and was thus expert. He has returned the devices and I am supposed to come this afternoon and help further.
As I don’t use iCloud much myself and don’t know exactly what was wrong or what was done, it will be challenging, and want to take the ‘do no harm’ approach. Hence this post.
Is there a safe, structured approach to:
- recover photos
- recover contacts
- ‘merge’ (or whatever its called) new photos and newly set up contacts with previous?
Does it sound like we’ll have to contact Apple with the family member nearby to talk with them?
I’m not sure what the family member could have done that the material in iCloud was… deleted? archived by Apple? etc?
It seems odd to me that the material could have disappeared simply by resetting the phone and changing SIM card.
Anyway, a developing situation, I’ll add more later if situation becomes clearer.