I was hoping to restore my iPhone (that I use regularly and have iCloud backup enabled on) to a backup from a few days back. I have purchased a ton of space from Apple for iCloud for the purpose of ensuring everything I need stays there. Unfortunately, it only shows me the two most recent iCloud Backups. However, I have seen screenshots from people showing multiple available iCloud Backups to restore from. What gives with that?
Basically, Apple deleted my older backups, which I was not aware they did. When I spoke to Apple representatives, many were under the impression that Apple does not delete your Backups or stop backing up unless you are low on space (I am not low on space). So, extra confusion there when Apple representatives all aren't on the same page and hand out conflicting information.
I was wondering if there was any possibility that my iCloud backups still exist somewhere on Apple's servers, and if it would be possible to access them? I know things would have been at some point stored on multiple Apple servers. I understand this is a long shot, and I understand that I should have been backing up my phone in multiple ways (I actually do, but lost a message during the week I need to restore from).
Does anyone have insight into why Apple started doing this, especially when a user has purchased additional space and there is no need to delete?
Best Answer
iCloud Backup only stores the most recent backup of your device. Every time you take a new backup, the old one is automatically erased.
This is how it is supposed to be, and how it always has been (or at least for multiple years). It’s not something new, nor is it specific for your account. It doesn’t matter how much space you’ve bought, how much you’ve paid or how much free space you have.
You can have multiple iCloud backups stored on your account when you have multiple devices, or backups of older devices that you no longer have. As far as I recall, it is also possible to have multiple iCloud backups stored if you have done a major iOS update, so that you have the latest backup from before the upgrade, and the latest backup from after the upgrade.
There’s no user-accessible way of accessing backups that have been overwritten in this fashion. I doubt that Apple has any way to restore such backups either, as the disk blocks probably have been reused for other purposes in the mean while.
There's also no user-accessible way of asking iCloud Backup to keep two or more backups of the same device at different points in time.
If you want to have multiple point in time backups of the same device, you’ll need to use iTunes and backup on a local computer.