ICloud: How long are photos stored

ArsTechnica just wrote a great piece on this.

A quick outtake:

The simple answer is that your data is at least as safe as it is when stored on any remote server, if not more so. All data is transferred to computers and mobile devices using secure sockets layer via WebDAV, IMAP, or HTTP. All data except e-mail and notes—more on that later—are stored and encrypted on disk on Apple's servers. And secure authentication tokens are created on mobile devices to retrieve information without constantly transmitting a password.

And backups are stored and transferred encrypted. As for an employee being able to access a backup, only an Apple employee would be able to correctly answer that.

If an App was pulled from the store, they may not need to actually go into your backup to remove it. All apps have a unique identifier, and if anything they can just delete that backup for everyone (think of the backups being stored individually rather than a big ZIP file if you will). Again, this is internal to Apple so no one can fully answer that part.

Finally, backups do include the Keychain, but this is also encrypted and the key is tied to the device that did the backup.

From various places I have read online, Apple meets or exceeds (more often the case) standard security procedures in this regard.

If you go to a computer and log in to http://iCloud.com/photos you will be able to see the status of your library as rendered from Apple’s servers in the data center.

If your cloud library is corrupt, you can either:

• try and delete it and let it clear up and try a sync up from the one device that has your master copy / most complete library
• work with support to convince tier 1 support that you’ve read the instructions and don’t need basic training and need an engineer to look at your account on the server side

If your cloud library isn’t corrupt, you can then decide to wait out the sync or wipe that device and start the iCloud sync over. I’ve had times where things are blank and syncing for three to four days and it clear up so you might need do nothing but connect to WiFi and connect the device to power for a few 8 hour periods to let all the sync / upload / duplicate processes to run.

You might have something the code can’t resolve and need to get Tier 1 to refer you to engineering since Apple doesn’t let people contact iCloud engineering directly and you do need to work through support to get there if needed.