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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

hey.paris

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Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#41

Post by kalleboo »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #29
valleyer wrote: post #12

Send this in an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. He has a team that reads for stuff like this and can magically fix issues. I've had to do it before, also for a gift-card-related problem (different from yours), and I was contacted by a member of the Apple executive escalations team a couple days later.

I don't see stories anymore from this working. Back when it was under Jobs, there were more concessions from his team operating the account. And maybe in the early Cook years. Apple has trimmed a lot of fat. I did read about part of the product development org having a standup about trending social media cases, and prioritizing followup on items that were under public scrutiny.

I have a friend who did this last year after he had a poor support experience with AppleCare for his Apple Watch and he got a call from Executive support early the next morning

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#42

Post by b112 »

mh- wrote: post #38
sho wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It requires to have a full copy locally. yeah that's the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then, iCloud itself has been the sole source. Looks like there's some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)

Thanks, I have the same problem and need to do something about it. I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.

If you want to truly save your photos, make backups of the locals and put it in your safe deposit box at the bank. Or alternatively, at a trusted friend/relative's house.

Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and everything else.

If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't use Apple, yet I suspect that an encrypted external backup might be tied to your Apple ID, or some such, because that's how the world flies today.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#43

Post by [deleted] »

x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

[deleted]

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#44

Post by breppp »

x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

> It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale?

If I need to guess, gift cards are sold online in money laundering schemes, also on some platforms they are used to let you buy apps from a lower priced country

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#45

Post by mh- »

b112 wrote: post #42
mh- wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I have the same problem and need to do something about it. I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.

If you want to truly save your photos, make backups of the locals and put it in your safe deposit box at the bank. Or alternatively, at a trusted friend/relative's house. Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and everything else. If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't use Ap…

Yeah, the plan would be external disk -> offsite storage.

I wouldn't bother to encrypt, it's just family photos and I wouldn't want to complicate restores. Especially if it was my wife who eventually needed to use it.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#46

Post by mikepurvis »

sho wrote: post #31
mhammerc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Arq Backup automatically in the background. It copy Photos, iCloud files and my mails once every days to S3 with incremental backups. It requires to have a full copy locally. Works great! It is not hard to configure once, with the proper folders and settings.

> It requires to have a full copy locally. yeah that's the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then, iCloud itself has been the sole source. Looks like there's some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)

I recently rebuilt my home server as an unraid machine. Currently it’s mainly torrents and a Minecraft server but it’s got 10tb of locally redundant storage with a sightline to scale that to around 24tb, so it would be a logical place to store a full gphotos copy.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#47

Post by sho »

yardstick wrote: post #36
sho wrote: post #23

Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy. How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..

I run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.

this? https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd

seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don't have a mac in the middle

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#48

Post by [deleted] »

sho wrote: post #23

Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy. How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..

[deleted]

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#49

Post by userbinator »

To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.

After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer

I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things

That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.

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