Hi everyone, I'm currently really panicked and worried about the potential loss of items on my icloud account such as photos etc.
I have an Iphone 12. It was running on IOS17. It has never been backed up.
context: I unistalled my notes app which had a lot of important/sensitive data on there. I thought it was synced to my icloud (it wasn't.) I did this because I was trying to free up some storage for an app. I checked icloud site via face id and this confirmed things as I only saw my photos.
After realising all my notes were gone I panicked and called apple support, who said not much can be done on their end and that my best option was just to update my phone.
I did not immediately do this, instead I clicked the "update tonight" option. I think I then pressed some backups after (before it didnt let me because of low storage). This is where I fucked up royally. I asked chatgpt about possible recovery options for notes. I tried a computer app called phonerescue first, it didn't find any notes. (I used airplane mode on my phone and plugged it into my computer.) It didnt do anything to my phone though after thankfully.
Instead of giving up I tried another option chatgpt gave me called dr fone. I plugged my phone into the computer and this app put my phone into recovery mode and I couldn't exit it without it pay walling me.
I literally tried paying for it but because my cards are all connected to my phone the purchase wouldn't go through asit requires me to logon to mobile banking to verify myself. I didnt know what to do by that point as forcing it off and on wouldn't make it exit recovery mode, so I plugged into my computer and into itunes to restart it.
After it restarted it got locked in activation mode because im an idiot who cant remember my appleid password. So with all this being said, are the items on my icloud likely to be there? photos etc? when i logged on prior to my dilemma i saw my photos but im unsure if anything I did could actually mess this up.
right now ive submitted a request to rest my appleid password so i can sign back in to my phone.
Also sorry this is long but a thing to note is that the dr fone app on my computer would not uninstall when i tried to uninstall it. it kept saying it was running even when i tried closinig it.