A report at MacRumors says iOS 8 users who “reset all settings” are seeing iWork documents from iCloud Drive being erased despite a notification that “no data or media will be deleted”.
It seems that Apple is having an unexpectedly hard time with its latest launches, following the seemingly fake “bendgate” scandal that US consumer advocates Consumer Reports show affects all phones it tested should significant force be used, while noting that “all the phones we tested showed themselves to be pretty tough”.
Bendgate was followed up by an iOS 8.0.1 update that reportedly caused some (but not all) iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users to lose cellular connectivity and Touch ID fingerprint capability, while not affecting the iPhone 5S, 5C or 4S.
This was then followed up by the iOS 8.0.2 update that has worked perfectly for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models in this office, but which some in Australia reported as still causing issues (as described in the linked article).
Now comes the news that some iCloud Drive users with iOS 8 on their various iDevices have discovered that using the “Reset All Settings” function is unexpectedly deleting iWork documents stored in Apple’s new iCloud Drive.
Most iDevice users are unlikely to be using iCloud Drive as yet as enabling the feature comes with a warning that the iCloud Drive service is unavailable to Mac users who haven’t yet updated to OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
Given that Yosemite is still in beta, the vast majority of Mac users worldwide simply wouldn’t be using it yet.
Even so, iCloud Drive is being actively used by some who are running the Yosemite beta, and when some of these users who had updated their devices to iOS 8 and decided to “reset all settings” to clean things up a bit, their iCloud Drive documents, specifically those used by Apple’s iWork apps, namely Work, Pages and Numbers apps, appear to have been deleted with no “recycle bin” or “trash can” to restore from, as is the case with other cloud services like Dropbox.
Interestingly, other documents such as plain text files aren’t being reported as deleted, only documents that are compatible with Apple’s iWork, suggesting an accidental bug that will presumably be fixed urgently – perhaps with an iOS 8.0.3 update or in the back-end without needing any end-user updates at all.
It is important to note that “reset all settings” is a different option to “erase all content and settings”, with the erase option apparently not causing iCloud Drive files to be erased.
Much more information can be found at the original MacRumors story, but perhaps the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” will ultimately work in Apple’s favour, with the vast majority of iOS 8 users set to be completely unaffected by this bug as the option to “reset all settings” just isn’t one most people use with any regularity, if ever.
