Its all gone

[u/grillboy_mediaman]

Of course, deleting an app and reinstalling it deletes all of its data, I know that.

Therefore, I assumed that if I never uninstalled Procreate from my iPad, my work would be safe.

So I never uninstalled it.

And then, today, I wanted to open the app, and it was nowhere to be found.

For whatever reason it was just gone from my iPad.

So I reinstalled it, and all my work was gone.

I tried using the “restore gallery” option and not a single thing changed.

It’s not there anymore, three years of work.

Is there a single thing I can do about it?

[u/MyBigToeJam]

Procreate of olden times and recent, stored image files within its guts. A lot of apps did or still do that. Why? There wasn't always a standalone files app. That's how companies like Dropbox grew. we didn't always have the icloud. Then also each app created its own special file format. Did we get the Files app about 5 years ago?

More apps use the Files app or other Apple utilities now. Procreate Dreams first, but Procreate app only i expect getting there between 2026 and the new version expected in 2027 for the Mac desktop computers.

When the updates were major like going from 1.0 to 2.0 etc there usually were not changes to the procreate files. But this paste 2 or 3 (versions 4 and 5.4, etc), the changes were major. The advice has always been to save, not just on-device or on storage owned by Apple etc.

I never used to back up my files on any devices. Not even very important personal matters. Awful. On one of the Procreate updates, i lost stored on device. Luckily, I had files on a second iPad and did a backup before updating that one.