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Reunion & iCloud - Lessons I just learned

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    Reunion & iCloud - Lessons I just learned

    Hi - I want to share my story about losing my Reunion file and finding it again with the help of Apple support. Maybe others can learn from my inexperience and mistakes. I hope you can follow this....it is hard to bring all the words and sentences together to attempt to describe this.

    I try to keep my files backed up to many different places. I have an Apple Time Capsule (the hero of this story), other USB drives, and portable thumb drives, and iCloud (for off-premises storage). I thought I was smart and covered with all kinds of redundancy. But....

    One week when I thought I copied my Reunion file to iCloud for back up, I actually did not copy it, I moved it to the cloud and removed it from my PC. I immediately copied the file back to my local PC hard drive. But apparently....Reunion was happy to follow my file to the cloud. I am sure there is something I did to enable this, but I really do not know. All I know is that for 3 weeks I continued to update my Reunion file - on the cloud.

    As always, I kept backing up the PC version of the file. The funny thing was, the PC-based file never changed because Reunion was working on the iCloud version. (hope you are following this....)

    Eventually, I was cleaning up my iCloud files and I deleted the Reunion file - after all, I thought my "main/active" file was on my PC, not in the cloud and I have lots of other backups. But I was wrong. After deleting the file, Reunion opened up and asked me what file to use. When I pointed to my main PC file, it was missing the last 3-4 weeks of work. When I looked at all of my old, manual backups, I found they had the PC-base revision that was 3 weeks old. PANIC! I finally figured out that the last 3 weeks of work was updating the iCloud version of the file.

    After working with the great support folks at Apple, I got to a tech guru and he showed me how my Time Capsule/Time Machine actually backed up my iCloud files. So...one peak into Time Machine and the latest file was THERE! I performed a simple file recovery and my 3 weeks of missing work was returned to me. No muss. No fuss.

    I am not asking anyone for advice, I know what I did and how to fix it. I actually thought about not sharing this story because this was such a stupid mistake and I did not want to hear people telling me about it. But I finally decided to share this story because everyone makes mistakes and if my little story can prevent anyone from making this exact mistake again, then it will be worth it. The panic of losing 3-4 weeks of work was overwhelming. The chance to get it back is amazing.

    Good luck to all of you out there...hope you are smarter than me! Janet

    #2
    Hi Janet,

    Originally posted by jmccracken View Post
    But apparently....Reunion was happy to follow my file to the cloud. I am sure there is something I did to enable this, but I really do not know.
    Reunion stores an alias pointing to your family file so that if it gets moved or renamed Reunion still knows where the file is/what the file is called. There's nothing you did to enable that -- that's the default behavior of Reunion; it helps avoid "losing" the file in such situations.

    The issue occurred because you made a copy of the file instead of moving the file when you tried to get it back out of iCloud. Had you moved the file, instead of copying it, Reunion would have appropriately "followed" the file.

    I only mention this as I think it's important to note for anyone who is reading your story. It may help them avoid the same issue.

    HTH


    Mark Harrison
    Leister Productions, Inc.

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      #3
      Thanks...that fills in some blanks. Love Reunion. I think I could use it for 20 years and still learn something every month.

      Comment


        #4
        Janet - Thanks for sharing that. It's useful to know - Also thanks Mark... good insight and a timely reminder for me.

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