Microsoft
Microsoft@MarcioVieira We have made some improvements in restore flows in last few releases. Could you please share logs from your Authenticator app?
@Sirisha_Dudiki I hope the logs shared by others here will be enough for you guys to fix your software. I can't provide logs anymore because I deleted the Microsoft Authenticator from my phone and from my life, and I don't want to see it ever again. Of all features you guys could be "improving" with user feedback, *this* should not be one of them.
After spending over an hour on the phone with Microsoft tech support, they blamed Apple for not saving the backup and told me to contact them instead. But, as Rob_Targett and others pointed out, the backup is actually being deleted by Microsoft Authenticator itself. Out of panic, I did open a ticket with Apple, who stayed on the phone with me troubleshooting for over 2 hours. They connected me to an iCloud engineer who looked everywhere and still couldn't find the **bleep** backup file.
So, I gave up. I'm now in the process of contacting all organizations and websites I had codes for, to convince them of my identity. It will take weeks to unlock an investment banking account (manual review), but other systems are a little easier to deal with so hopefully I'll have everything back by the end of October. Sigh.
Lesson learned, I'm starting to use Google Authenticator from now on. I know it probably has some issues too, but apparently it got the basics right. Also, it allows you to save a key to recover your codes in catastrophic cases, which makes a lot of sense and is something Microsoft should do too.
