A report today says there may be a serious bug in the iOS 8 Reset All Settings option that causes users who have activated iCloud Drive to lose all of the iWork documents stored there.
According to multiple posters on the MacRumors forums, using the “Reset All Settings” option under General –> Reset has caused documents to be permanently deleted from iCloud Drive.
One forum member writes:
Because iOS 8 was so sluggish on my iPad 3 I reset all settings (No data or media will be deleted) and sped it up BUT deleted my iWork data! Then promptly synced and deleted it in iCloud. I have public beta of Yosemite so can’t roll back via time machine. I have no pre iOS 8 backups in iTunes or iCloud to revert to (well iCloud device backups don’t contain cloud documents and I should have iOS 7 backups in iTunes but can’t find any. iCloud has no trash like dropbox. They seem gone forever.
The “Reset All Settings” option is meant to reset all user preferences to the original settings as if the device was right out of the box. It is not supposed to delete any data or media stored on the device. The bug may be limited to iWork documents, including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. One user reported losing all his iWork documents when using the “Reset All Settings” option, however other app info remained in iCloud.
MacRumors found that “Reset All Settings” deleted all iWork documents in iCloud Drive on the phone and on iCloud.com. After a sync occurred on a Mac running OS X Yosemite. all of the documents disappeared from that machine, while Preview and TextEdit documents remained untouched.
One user noted that Apple engineers were investigating the issue, while another noted that his account had been placed in troubleshooting mode in an attempt to recover the data.
If you’re using iCloud Drive on your devices, you might want to avoid using the “Reset All Settings” option on your devices to avoid erasing any documents you have stored in iCloud Drive.
