iCloud.com now lets you recover deleted files, contacts, and calendars

By Joseph Keller
last updated

Apple has introduced a new feature for iCloud on the web that allows you to restore deleted items. Not only can you recover files that you've deleted, but also restore contacts, calendars, and reminders. This new feature also shows you how long it will be until those items are permanently deleted if you choose not to restore them.

To access these advanced options, sign in to iCloud.com, and head to the Settings section. At the bottom left of the screen, you'll see the Advanced, Restore Files, Restore Contacts, and Restore Calendars and Reminders options. Choosing one of those will open a panel that shows you your deleted documents or archived contacts and calendars.

Picking a document will restore it to iCloud Drive. Contacts and calendars work a bit differently. Rather than restoring a deleted contact, calendar, or reminder, iCloud will replace your current contacts or calendars an archive of your previous setups. You current configurations will be saved in an archive of their own. It's important to note that any shared calendars that are restored will need to be re-shared with other users, as iCloud won't restore that.

You should be able to find these new settings by heading to iCloud.com now.

Source: Apple; Via: 9to5Mac

Joseph Keller
Joseph Keller

Joseph Keller is the former Editor in Chief of iMore. An Apple user for almost 20 years, he spends his time learning the ins and outs of iOS and macOS, always finding ways of getting the most out of his iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac.

15 Comments
  • iCloud is a complete clusterf#$k. 5Gb/month is useless, Apple's prices for cloud storage (big shock) are stupidly high. I'd say 1 in 20 iPhone users have their photos in a safe place. iPhotos, photos or whatever Apple is calling it this week just confuses people. Apple goes by the mantra 'it just works' but ask most people about their photos and they have no idea what's going on there. Flame me all you want, I can navigate the mess myself but most people are not taking the time to figure it out. and music just joined the ranks of nebulous existence on your iProduct.
  • Just download Google Photos for backing up your photos. Unlimited, for free. Let iCloud do the rest.
  • Google's free option destroys video quality. Especially high frame rate video. Its okay for photos, but not for video. Better off using OneDrive and its 30GB free storage if you want the all around best solution - high storage capacity with super cheap upgrades coupled with full resolution and quality backups. Unless you want to pay more for iCloud storage, which is a no brainer if you run an all apple ecosystem on your devices. Kind of hard to access Google Photos or OneDrive from an AppleTV, last I checked.
  • Is there another service out there besides Google Photos that will let you search by face, item in photo, etc? That's been one of the coolest features about it, but I don't have much in the Google ecosystem any more and don't really want to keep all of our photos there.
  • Flickr.
  • I am using This Life from Shutterfly and have 119',000 pictures and a lot of videos, I am paying for it because of the videos I think $160 a year but the photos are unlimited, it has some great features, Faces, Places with names that I never knew them, I also have a camera with Gps that I love. Albums, I think everything you would want, sorts by dates, j
    Years, months. Etc. they have now out it onto the Shutterfly website, also have a great downloader
  • How does it do recognizing and searching by faces? Also, maintaining meta-data when transferring from other sites? This looks really interesting and I might try this out.
  • I'm also not seeing any way to sign up... there is a log in screen, but no way to register / sign up? Do you have to use an already existing Shutterfly account?
  • Can it finally let me use iMessage on my work PC? :-)
  • Useful addition Sent from the iMore App
  • This is a security hole purposely built in to the system. I bet there will be no way to turn it off either. Just like there is no easy way to delete pictures from the Photos app, now the same will be true of all the files in iCloud drive. What about the users that are actually quite sure about what they want to delete or don't want to delete? Why do I have to delete a file, then find a "deleted files" folder, then open it up, and then delete the deleted file instead of just deleting the file? I realise this is a good feature for dummies but we should have the capability to turn stuff like this off. If I forget to "delete my deletions" then anyone randomly using my computer can see the files that I thought were deleted. It's not a feature to have to delete everything twice just to be sure things are deleted.
  • Can somebody please proofread this article?
  • This has been available for a few months now.
  • Well, I wasn't aware of it and I use the iCloud website almost on a daily basis. I am glad they informed us.
  • The way they implemented this... makes it almost useless in practice.