Why is my Apple data export missing my photos and health data?
You asked Apple for everything and got a set of archives covering your account, purchases, AppleCare, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and notes. No photographs. No Health data. No messages. It looks like most of your life is missing, and it is reasonable to assume the export failed.
Can you get it back?
It did not fail, and almost all of it is still available - just not from that page. What Apple sends is the data Apple can read. Everything absent is either end-to-end encrypted, which means Apple holds it as a blob it has no key for, or it is offered as a separate download you have to ask for on its own. Each missing piece has somewhere else to get it, and most of them are quicker than the request you already made.
What actually happened
Apple's Data and Privacy export can only contain what Apple is able to decrypt. Some categories are end-to-end encrypted for every account, with no setting involved: Health, and the passwords in iCloud Keychain. Apple cannot produce those because it cannot read them. That is not a gap in the export, it is the encryption doing exactly what it is sold as doing.
Photographs and iCloud Drive files are a different case. They are not secret from Apple, they are simply enormous, so they are offered as their own download rather than bundled with the account records. If you did not tick them, or did not notice a second delivery, you will not have them.
A real export inspected for this page was eighteen archives covering account and device information, Apple Media Services, the Apple Store, AppleCare, Bookmarks, Calendars and Reminders, Contacts, Notes, Marketing communications, Wallet activity, Game Center and a category Apple simply calls Other Data. That is a complete export. It is also nothing like everything.
This one catches people who did the privacy-conscious thing. Normally a handful of categories are end-to-end encrypted. Turn on Advanced Data Protection and that rises to around twenty-three, taking in Photos, Notes and iCloud Backup among others - and every category it covers becomes one Apple can no longer hand over. So the more thoroughly you protect your iCloud data, the less of it appears in a data request, and the more you have to collect from your own devices instead. The data is not lost and nothing has gone wrong; the keys are on your hardware, which is the entire point. It is just the opposite of what you would expect the privacy setting to do to a privacy request. Related: if you have turned off web access to iCloud data, that also limits what the export tool can return.
How to fix it
Where each missing piece actually lives. None of these needs a support ticket.
- Health data - from the phone, about a minute
- Open the Health app, tap your profile picture at the top right, scroll to the very bottom and choose Export All Health Data. It produces a zip holding export.xml. Be ready for it to be large - years of watch data runs to hundreds of megabytes of XML in a single file, which is why plenty of tools choke on it. There is a full guide to this on the site under Apple Health, including the two places the export quietly fails.
- Photos and videos - a separate request or a direct download
- On the Data and Privacy page, iCloud Photos is its own item to select rather than part of the account archives, and it arrives as its own set of files. If you would rather not wait, you can download albums directly from iCloud.com, or from the Photos app on a Mac choose the originals and export them to a folder. The direct routes are usually faster and give you the same files.
- Passwords - Settings, not the export
- iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted and will never appear in a data request. Recent versions of iOS and macOS can export your saved passwords to a CSV from the Passwords screen. Treat that file with care and delete it when you are done - it is the one genuinely dangerous thing in this list.
- Messages - not offered at all
- There is no route to get iMessage history from a data request. The only copy is the one on your device or in an unencrypted local backup made through a computer. If messages are what you are after, plan around that rather than waiting for an export that will not contain them.
How Muletto does it
Muletto reads the Data and Privacy archives directly, including the ones nested inside other archives - in the export inspected here, seven of the eighteen contained further archives holding several hundred entries that are invisible until they are opened. Contacts, calendars, notes and the account tables all come through. Drop the separate photo download in alongside them and it is treated as one library rather than two.
Stopping it happening again
When you make the request, go through the category list rather than accepting the default selection, and take the photographs as their own item. If you are about to turn on Advanced Data Protection, take the export first: it is easier to ask Apple once than to collect the same material off four devices later.
The category list is from a real Apple Data and Privacy export of eighteen archives, inspected for this page. Which categories are end-to-end encrypted, and that Advanced Data Protection widens that set to around twenty-three, is from Apple's own security documentation, checked in August 2026. The export routes for Health, passwords and photos are from Apple's documentation rather than walked here, so check the exact wording on your own device.