Data Loss After Apple Store Trade-In – Misguided by Staff, No Backup Recovered

Hi everyone, I’m posting on behalf of my wife who recently went through a really upsetting experience at the White City Apple Store in London.

She went in on 8th May to trade in her MacBook Air for a new MacBook Pro. Before going ahead, she specifically and repeatedly asked the Apple staff whether her data was fully backed up and safe. She was confidently reassured that as long as she logged into iCloud on her new MacBook, all her files would appear. Based on this advice, she proceeded.

Unfortunately, once she got home and set up the new MacBook Pro, nothing had transferred. Two years’ worth of work, gone.

She returned to the store the next day in distress. A technician was kind and apologetic, but the manager insisted it was her responsibility to have backed up manually and to have read the terms and conditions. While we understand personal responsibility is important, the key issue here is that an Apple representative repeatedly reassured her everything was safe, and then erased the device.

Apple Support over the phone has been more empathetic. A senior technician advised her to return to the store to resolve things. But then the store said they couldn’t do anything and blamed the support team for “not understanding how the store works.” What’s worse is that the store had the opportunity to use Migration Assistant right then and there to safely transfer everything, but they didn’t. We were even willing to stay late or return the next day, but they seemed more focused on closing the sale and wrapping up for the evening. If they had just told us, “iCloud might not have everything, and we recommend using Migration Assistant”, we absolutely would have waited or come back. We were not in a rush, they were.

So now we’re stuck in the middle of two parts of Apple contradicting each other, and my wife is left with no files and no accountability from anyone.

We’re posting here hoping someone from Apple or the wider community can advise on what to do next. We’ve escalated through normal channels, but it feels like no one’s really owning the issue. This wasn’t just a technical error, it was a failure in human communication and trust.

Appreciate any guidance on next steps, or if anyone else has gone through something similar.