How to Recover Deleted Photos, Files, Contacts and Calendars From iCloud

Apple's iCloud allows you to recover files you've deleted from iCloud Drive. iCloud offers you to recover deleted files, contacts, calender and photos upto 30 days, even if you've emptied the Trash on your Mac or wiped them from iPhone or iPad. 

Restore files, Contacts and Calenders from iCloud's Website

Apple allows you to restore iCloud Drive files, contacts and calender. To access this feature, visit iCloud Website and sign in with your Apple ID. Click the setting button, scroll down and you'll see "Advanced" options at the bottom of the page. 


At the bottom left corner of the web page, you'll see links to Restore files, Restore Contacts and Restore calender & Remainder. When restoring files, you can choose the individual files you want to restore.


Restore Photos from iCloud Photo Library


You can restore these photos on iCloud website, on a Mac with the photos app, or on your iPhone or iPad.
 

  • Any Web Browser: Go to iCloud’s website, sign in, click the Photos icon, select the “Albums” category, and open the “Recently Deleted” album. 
  • iPhone or iPad: Open the Photos app, select Albums, and select Recently Deleted. 
  • Mac OS X: Open the Photos app, click the File menu, and select “Show Recently Deleted.” Unlike on other platforms, there’s no “Recently Deleted” album in the Albums view here.

As with files you delete in iCloud Drive, copies of your deleted photos are stored for 30 days. 


 

Restore from a Device Backup

If you never enabled iCloud contact syncing on your iPhone, but you desperately need to restore your contacts after they've been deleted. Here is a solution, if you created backup of your iPhone in iTunes, you could restore full device backup to get the data and everything else. 


You could potentially do this with iCloud backups, too. if you automatically upload photos to Dropbox or Google Photos, you can restore deleted photos from those apps and websites.



If you sync your contacts with your Google account, you can go to the Gmail website, open the Contacts view, and use the More > Restore contacts option to restore deleted contacts. Other services may have similar tools.