iCloud.com feature allows for Time Machine-esque restoration of files, contacts and calendars

This might come in handy.

Without a ton of fanfare, Apple has quietly added a new data restore feature to iCloud.com, enabling users to rollback accidentally deleted documents, calendar changes and contacts. A series of new ‘Restore Files’, ‘Restore Contacts’ and ‘Restore Calendars’ features are hidden in the iCloud.com Advanced Settings pane.

The new service apparently allows snapshots of your recently deleted documents and lets you put them back onto iCloud Drive. This allows you to recover accidentally deleted iCloud documents, a first since there’s never been a Trash folder equivalent in the iCloud.

Contacts can also be restored via timestamped snapshots of your iCloud contacts database, much like the Restore function in Time Machine. Unlike with files, you cannot individually restore single contacts. The same is true for Calendars.

Restoring calendars comes with its own downsides, as restoring calendars will cause invitations to be resent and sharing to be disabled, for example. You can still go back to your current version of calendars if you restore the wrong iCloud file, as the system will make a new snapshot of your current data before going ahead with the restore function.

In the Files tab, iCloud.com will display the number of days left until the file is permanently deleted and no longer able to be restored. The data restoration does not go back indefinitely and appears to hold about 30 days worth of data, although it appears to vary on a per file basis.

The iCloud restoration interface is expected to appear natively on future versions of Mac OS X and iOS, as its current location is currently hidden and undiscoverable.

Still, it’s basically Time Machine for iCloud, which is something people have wanted for a number of years now.

Via 9to5Mac