A friend of mine has very recently deleted her iPhone 6S Plus with iOS 12.4.6 (the "deleted" iPhone) from within Find My iPhone via iCloud.com by clicking on the "Erase iPhone" option thinking that this will only disable tracking of her iPhone. The "deleted" iPhone no longer appears in Find My iPhone menus on iCloud.com. However, because the "deleted" iPhone was turned off at the time the "Erase iPhone" option was selected on iCloud.com, the contents of the "deleted" iPhone were actually not erased.
Before the iPhone is turned on, my friend has noticed that that the action she took through iCloud.com will also erase all the contents of her "deleted" iPhone. She has then decided that she does not want her "deleted" iPhone to be erased for a number of reasons including not all the contacts on the "deleted" iPhone being synced to iCloud (although the contacts option is enabled in the "deleted" iPhone's iCloud settings).
To prevent erasing of the "deleted" iPhone at least for now, she took out the "deleted" iPhone's SIM card and disabled the internet in her home before turning on the "deleted" iPhone. She can currently get into the "deleted" iPhone without any trouble (but of course without any internet connection) and is busy writing down the contacts not synced to iCloud.com!
She also owns a second iPhone that is synced to iCloud via the same Apple ID with the "deleted" iPhone (and the second iPhone, as you might expect, doesn't have the missing contacts from iCloud.)
So here is the question:
Is there any action she can take through the "deleted" iPhone or her 2nd iPhone or a computer that will nullify at least the "erase all content" part of the command to be communicated to this iPhone from iCloud.com once it is connected to the internet?
Thank you.
Best Answer
I am not sure if the same would happen in all similar cases but I just want to tell what happened to my friend's iPhone after posting the above.
For about two weeks she made sure her phone did not connect to the Internet by disabling the Wifi and taking out the SIM card. In the meantime, she wrote down the details of her important contacts missing from the iCloud. Once she wrote down everything she needed, she turned the Wifi on and ... nothing happened. The iPhone connected to the Internet and continued to operate as usual as if the Erase iPhone option was not activated via iCloud.com.
When we checked the iPhone's status on iCloud via Find My iPhone, it only appeared to be offline. Out of an abundance of caution, we disabled the Find My iPhone menu option through the iPhone's settings. This caused the iPhone to be removed from the list of Apple devices listed under the Find My iPhone menu on the iCloud associated with her Apple ID. She has been using her iPhone as usual since then.