help pictures lost after update

**boned** · 10-26-2011, 06:59 PM

Long story short my wife's phone did not backup before updating to 5.0 and after it was done the phone restored using a backup from 6 months ago. This was the only backup she had made for some reason. We lost everything including pictures of our new baby. First days home, first time crawling, the whole bit.

Is there anyway to recover these pictures and videos, or am I boned. I am thinking once an backup is applied to the phone all previous data is lost.

**icebox93** · 10-27-2011, 09:45 PM

This is the sort of situation that arises because iTunes doesn't automatically do a backup before installing the new OS. It's really stupid on apple's part, Blackberry does this before installing a new OS and that would have solved your problem before it happened.

Getting the pictures back will not be simple. First, the pictures will be recoverable only if the space where they were in the memory chip has not been overwritten. Second in order to know whether they are recoverable, you have to go through a series of operations and you won't know if there's even a chance of success until the end. There's a thread from 2009-2010 at modmyi describing the process, which involves jailbreaking, dumping the iPhone's disk to a file on your computer, and then searching the dump for any picture files that may have survived the upgrade. . I don't envy you. File recovery is a difficult operation under the best of circumstances, and Apple makes things difficult because they don't let the device mount like an external drive. This is why you have to jailbreak to achieve a recovery.

I've lost precious family video, though not in the same way. AD video tape containing video of my daughter's first few months of life disappeared after we moved from Maryland to Illinois, and we have no clue why it wasn't with all the other home video tapes which made it cross country safely. I thought the tape might turn up when we moved again two years ago and were sorting through lots of stuff to minimize what we were moving, but it didn't. It sucks beyond words.

Good luck.

**Peligro911** · 10-27-2011, 10:55 PM

When I updated iTunes auto back up my phone first thats weird ... Sad to hear thou

Sent Into Orbit from my iPhone 4S using Tapatalk

**icebox93** · 10-28-2011, 10:50 AM

Peligro, when I've done OS upgrades I've never seen Itunes do a backup before putting the device in DFU mode. I generally do a manual sync before starting the process though, and perhaps Itunes doesn't bother backing up when there's a recent backup. Though now that I think about it I seem to recall turning automatic backup off because there were times when it was getting annoying. But looking around Itunes and its settings I don't see an option for that, only a greyed out "open itunes when device is connected" option.

**sicario666** · 10-28-2011, 11:10 AM

Originally Posted by Peligro911

When I updated iTunes auto back up my phone first thats weird ... Sad to hear thou

Sent Into Orbit from my iPhone 4S using Tapatalk

Yeah. Mine did the same.

**taylornicole23** · 09-18-2012, 04:23 PM

does this work with the 4s too?!?!?!?!

**danimal1968** · 09-20-2012, 01:17 PM

Originally Posted by boned

Long story short my wife's phone did not backup before updating to 5.0 and after it was done the phone restored using a backup from 6 months ago. This was the only backup she had made for some reason. We lost everything including pictures of our new baby. First days home, first time crawling, the whole bit.

Is there anyway to recover these pictures and videos, or am I boned. I am thinking once an backup is applied to the phone all previous data is lost.

Did your wife by any chance have photostream enabled?