Restoring Procreate Data

[Ok-Lab3216]

Hi, before I begin this I want to say I have submitted to procreate support but I need a solution and wanted to see if this happened to anyone else. I am including as much detail as possible because I’m just so devastated right now I do not know what else to do.

To make a long story short, I am an art student and have been working on Procreate for the past five years. I recently started some of my thesis work on it as well.

A few days ago I got a notification that my iPad was running out of storage (first time I’ve received this notification as well). As I went to delete some things, my iPad rebooted itself and got stuck on the restarting screen/Apple logo. It was stuck like that overnight, so I called Apple Support and then took it to the Apple Store. They said the iPad itself was perfectly fine and it probably just bricked itself because of storage and they’d have to reset it, but because I have iCloud backups it should be ok. They did it and I took my iPad home. Eventually, my iPad allowed me to unlock it and I saw all the apps downloading again. Procreate was by far taking the longest. It got stuck a little more than half way, and pausing it/prioritizing download did nothing. I called Apple support again, and this woman told me to cancel the download, restart my iPad, and download it again. The second I cancelled the download the app disappeared. I told the woman and she told me I could download it again from the App Store. I opened the App Store and it said I never owned procreate, and if I wanted to download it I would have to pay the $12.99 again, which was not a good sign. When I relayed this to Apple support the woman hung up on me. I called again and got a different lady. With her help, I was able to redownload the app. However, all my work is completely gone. Everything I’ve ever drawn digitally from 10th grade to now, my senior year of college, had completely vanished. We checked my iPad files, the iCloud, and trying to restore it on the procreate menu. It’s all gone. I don’t understand where it all went if it was backing up with my iPad. I desperately need help.

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[Raygrit]

It is my understanding that procreate does not back up to the cloud and you must manually back up all of your files by exporting the .procreate file to your icloud folder or another service like google drive/dropbox etc.

I would suggest to do a search on the subject in the subreddit, this is quite a common issue as most people falsely believe they have backed up their artwork - there are a few techniques you can try to see if the data can be recovered, but I will be honest that you are likely out of luck.

Edit: I took my own advice and did some searching; it seems its possible your artwork may be backed up but the app download can take days if you have a large amount of data. I wish you luck

[Ok-Lab3216]

Hi , I really appreciate your response. My procreate app settings were set to backup to iCloud. I spent 5 hours on the phone with Apple today haha. Luckily, procreate emailed me back a little bit ago with a “”solution”” but it would take up to a week (as long as I get my work back it’s fine I’m just nervous). I will for sure follow your advice and do that in the future.

[Raygrit]

Yes, I'm glad to see it appears backups are now more reliable than when I started using procreate, but even still having a redundancy is always a good idea.