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Cannot retrieve photos have have been permanently deleted from iCloud drive.

I have my iCloud Backup on, however the photos that have been permanently deleted from my physical phone are also missing from my iCloud Drive backup. Why is this? How do I get those photos back?

Posted on Oct 4, 2022 12:50 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 4, 2022 12:56 PM

iCloud is a syncing service, not an archive. It will always exactly reflect what is on your phone, so if you delete a photo from your phone it will also be deleted from iCloud.


There are many ways of preserving photos and videos. Did you do any of these?


  • emailed, texted or messaged the photos to friends or family
  • iCloud photo sync
  • iCloud backup
  • iTunes backup
  • Transfer your photos to your computer via USB cable
  • Apple Photo Stream
  • Sync to Google Photos
  • Sync to some other photo archiving service such as Shutterfly
  • Sync to Dropbox
  • Sync to box.com
  • Sync to Microsoft OneDrive
  • Sync to Amazon Photos
  • back up to Livedrive
  • Backup to any other backup or archiving service


A final option is if you synced your photos to iCloud, you have a Mac, and you use Time Machine to back up your Mac automatically, you can open Time Machine and restore the photo library to an earlier date. To do this on your Mac open Finder, then click on Pictures in the sidebar and launch Time Machine. Go to a time before the photos were deleted and restore

Photos Library.photoslibrary. (If you had ever changed the name of the photo library restore that file instead).


If the answer is no to all of the above your photos are gone forever.


2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 4, 2022 12:56 PM in response to AUD2022

iCloud is a syncing service, not an archive. It will always exactly reflect what is on your phone, so if you delete a photo from your phone it will also be deleted from iCloud.


There are many ways of preserving photos and videos. Did you do any of these?


  • emailed, texted or messaged the photos to friends or family
  • iCloud photo sync
  • iCloud backup
  • iTunes backup
  • Transfer your photos to your computer via USB cable
  • Apple Photo Stream
  • Sync to Google Photos
  • Sync to some other photo archiving service such as Shutterfly
  • Sync to Dropbox
  • Sync to box.com
  • Sync to Microsoft OneDrive
  • Sync to Amazon Photos
  • back up to Livedrive
  • Backup to any other backup or archiving service


A final option is if you synced your photos to iCloud, you have a Mac, and you use Time Machine to back up your Mac automatically, you can open Time Machine and restore the photo library to an earlier date. To do this on your Mac open Finder, then click on Pictures in the sidebar and launch Time Machine. Go to a time before the photos were deleted and restore

Photos Library.photoslibrary. (If you had ever changed the name of the photo library restore that file instead).


If the answer is no to all of the above your photos are gone forever.


Cannot retrieve photos have have been permanently deleted from iCloud drive.

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