I'll try to make this short; I:
-Attempted to downgrade my iPhone X on beta 6 back to iOS 11
-Got recovering data loop
-Recovery mode restored iOS 11
-Found out the hard way that my iTunes backup only works with iOS 12 since it overrwrites per device
-Installed iOS 12 beta 8 and restored from backup I made before starting the downgrade
-Everything is intact but i have ZERO pictures.
Here's the weird stuff. I:
-Had about 30gb in the cloud, which I happened to have looked at this morning when I did the latest backup
-I now have only 12gb
-I don't use iCloud photo library
-iCloud says my iPhone has 2gb in the cloud, but also says it has NEVER been backed up to the cloud...
So it appears that somewhere in this process, I am assuming in the iCloud restore phase, all my pictures were removed from iCloud...
...and somehow I restored from a backup that doesn't exist.