Apple Reminders are incredible. Until they all disappear.

I am completely dependent on my virtual calendar.? Important meetings, doctor appointments, social events, anything—they go into my calendar and then I forget about them until the reminder appears.? Unlike anything in the physical world, my virtual version is synced between all my devices and even can be completely voice controlled.

Apple Reminders have served as this virtual appointment book for me.? Literally anything that I need to remember on a certain date or time became a reminder.? With Apple devices constantly at my fingertips, they easily became second nature.

I don’t sync a lot of data to iCloud, but recently, with my free 5G of iCloud was almost used up, I splurged and bought the $0.99/month upgrade to iCloud+ with 50G.? I thought I could start using this as a place to back up documents, etc.

But shortly after this upgrade (I am not sure it is related, but it is the only thing that changed), I didn’t get a reminder.? And then I noticed that I hand’t gotten a reminder in a few days.? I went into Reminders and, to my horror, it was completely empty.

Scrambling to get them back, I found a number of suggestions to retrieve them—turning syncing on and off, rebooting your iPhone, restoring from a backup in iCloud.? None of these worked for me, and I had no backups in iCloud.? I thought possibly my Mac with Time Machine might have a file from the past with my reminders synced to them.? But there were no files in the Library directories that should have held my reminders.

I did have a sudden moment of inspiration—I had an iPad in my drawer that I hadn’t touched in a while.? Maybe it still had my data?? It was out of battery, so I charged it to 2%, quickly turned it on, and went to Reminders.? For a moment, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief—my reminders were still there!? I was saved!? But then, Reminders must have started to sync with iCloud, and as I watched helplessly, I saw all my reminders disappear.

My next stop was Apple Support.? They were very nice, but after 25 minutes with a support tech, they admitted there was nothing they could do.

I feel very confident that somewhere in a data center, there is a week old backup of my data. Somewhere out there, all of my appointments still exist.? But I doubt my appointments rise to the level of an emergency for Apple, and without some engineering actively working to retrieve them, before long my data will be permanently overwritten by another rolling backup.

I fully admit that there could be something I did that caused this.? It is quite possible that I fat-fingered the Reminders slider, unsyncing it with iCloud on one of devices before noticing and putting the slider back to sync.? Maybe the order that I did something or some timing issue caused the problem—but for a consumer app, I believe that simple setting changes should really not cause catastrophic data loss on literally all my Apple devices.

I am still in the anger stage of grief.? In a fit of rage, I cancelled my $0.99/month iCloud+ upgrade.? I expect this will really hit Apple where it hurts—on their bottom line.

I wanted to let everyone know so that you can secure your important data, and not suffer the same consequences I did.? But mostly I wanted you to know that this is the reason I may miss the important meeting with you or the social event.? Please understand—it is not that I didn’t think our meeting was important.? It is because Apple didn’t think my Reminders were important.