Lost photos and videos on update.

Might take a moment to disentangle this:

You upgraded your iPhone to iOS 18.1.1 and lost images from your phone, iCloud and your MacBook. This I can see as being possible.However, how are your back ups made? What devices have back ups on them? Can you explain the relationship between your back ups and the actual libraries? It might help us figure this out.

I was on iOS 18.1.1 and I just lost several videos from Christmas Eve. In other words my issue was not an upgrade because my 18.1.1 upgrade was several days ago. Now I have on my iPhone the 18.2 upgrade which I will upgrade to hoping for a Christmas miracle that I will get my videos back.

I believe they were lost when I started uploading videos and pictures to Facebook Messenger to a family album share. I have looked in deleted files and they are not there. They are gone.

I am extremely unhappy about this.

In other words my issue was not an upgrade because my 18.1.1 upgrade was several days ago.

This thread was created by someone who believes their issue is with 18.1.1. When you add in your (non-related) issue it's called thread-jacking. You pull the focus away from the original issue and the original author. So the best thing to dp is to make a new thread with your details of your issue. That way you won't have to wade through responses that don't relate to your issue, and neither will the original author.

"Why would it delete all the backups from all the devices?"

That might be a misunderstanding. iCloud Photos is not a backup. When you are using iCloud Photos to sync your devices, iCloud Photos is the central storage of all your photos and videos and when you work with your photos on on any device, you are always working with the photos in iCloud. Any photo you delete on your iPhone will be deleted from iCloud and then from all other devices. So iCloud cannot be a backup of your photos and videos, for all purposes it is holding the only copy of your photos. To keep your Photos save you need a backup outside of iCloud.

What iCloud Photos offers is very useful - it is keeping the photos libraries all devices identical and perfectly in sync, and it is storing the photos off-site, so we can recover our photos, if a device is lost or damaged. But it cannot protect us from user errors or an accidental deletion of photos.

Do you have a Time Machine backup of your Mac? It will include at least the photos that have been downloaded to the Mac.