Lost pictures due to auto photo backup and purchase of new iPhone

Question

Lost pictures due to auto photo backup and purchase of new iPhone

Anonymous

I am reaching out regarding an issue with the OneDrive photo backup feature on my iPhone.

I have a 1TB OneDrive subscription (educational) and had the automatic camera upload enabled on my previous iPhone. However, due to storage limitations on that device, I had to delete all of my photos because they had been fully backed up on OneDrive. Unfortunately, I did not have an additional iCloud backup for extra storage at the time.

After purchasing a new iPhone, I re-enabled the OneDrive camera upload feature. It is now successfully uploading new photos taken with the new device. However, none of the photos from my previous iPhone appear in my OneDrive Picture folder, and I’m concerned that I may have lost all my photos from the past several years.

Could you please clarify the following:

Is there a way to retrieve older photos that may have been uploaded previously or are stored in a backup location? I already tried the 'restore my OneDrive' option, but it doesn't let me go further than 29 days.
Does OneDrive keep a history or archive of photos that were once uploaded but possibly deleted from the cloud?
Are there any steps you can take to recover my lost media?

I would greatly appreciate your assistance in recovering these memories. Please let me know if you need any additional information from my end.

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4 answers

Answer 1

Mathieu,

Thank you for using Microsoft products and making community posts.

I understands the importance of resolving this issue, Don’t worry I will be helping you with this following steps.

Did you sign out your OneDrive account before deleting those photos?

Take note that if you will be deleting your pictures on your gallery without signing out your OneDrive account it will be also deleted on OneDrive since your Iphone and OneDrive still synced.

Try to check on the recycle bin of your OneDrive account and take that deleted files will be permanently deleted from OneDrive after 30 days.

Please feel free to let me know how it goes.

Chan G

Microsoft Community Moderator

Answer 2

Hello, thanks for your answer. Every time when I deleted the pictures of my iPhone to free up space, the pictures in OneDrive stayed there and didn’t disappear. Only after buying a new iPhone and setting up auto sync mode again, the folder was all emptied and only the pictures of the new iPhone were displayed. I don’t find this very serious of Microsoft, especially considering the price of Microsoft for Business and the cost of 1TB of storage that I didn’t even use up. What can you do to recover all these pictures for me? They are not in my recently deleted file or anywhere else.

Answer 3

Anonymous

Hi Mathieu,

Thank you for your response,

If those files was deleted less than 30 days then they should be staying on the OneDrive's recycle bin.

can you confirm to me what is exactly your subscription is? and on what OneDrive website did you sign in?

Regards,

Chan G

Microsoft Community Moderator

0 comments

Answer 4

Hi Mathieu,

We haven't heard from you in 72 hours, so we will be considering your issue resolved. If you do need further help, please create a new thread to discuss those concerns as we will not be monitoring this thread going forward.

Thank you for understanding.

Regards,

Chan G

Microsoft Community Moderator