OT - iPhone Data Recovery - SOLVED!

[Narflex]

YEAH!!!!!! I AM IN!!!! Currently copying the filesystem using FileZilla. Thanks a bunch to those of you that helped.



The only other thing not in the instructions listed above that I needed to do is here:

http://www.hackint0sh.org/f128/132063-2.htm#post548387

I had to repair one of the 'disks' on the iPhone before I could mount it.

[ToxMox]

Great to hear! Keep us in the loop if and when you actually recover everything you needed. I'm curious.

[Narflex]

I already have the files off it that mattered. Downloaded all the pictures and the SQL DB for the contacts and verified it's all good. Now I'm doing a copy of the entire filesystem. Once I have all the data....then the interesting thing will be if the phone reboots correctly. I did run a filesystem check and it corrected some errors; so maybe the phone will come back to life now as well. I'll let you know.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Narflex

I already have the files off it that mattered. Downloaded all the pictures and the SQL DB for the contacts and verified it's all good. Now I'm doing a copy of the entire filesystem. Once I have all the data....then the interesting thing will be if the phone reboots correctly. I did run a filesystem check and it corrected some errors; so maybe the phone will come back to life now as well. I'll let you know.

Now just have your wife plug that thing in once a month and no worries glad you got somewhere and it was interesting to follow if I ever have this issue I got all this boOkmarkes

[Narflex]

Well, it didn't magically come back to life after finishing the transfer and rebooting. But I should be able to do a full firmware restore on it and then restore the phone using what I've got backed up. Of course now the wife wants a new phone because she doesn't trust this one....not surprising.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Narflex

Well, it didn't magically come back to life after finishing the transfer and rebooting. But I should be able to do a full firmware restore on it and then restore the phone using what I've got backed up. Of course now the wife wants a new phone because she doesn't trust this one....not surprising.

Sounds like other half for some reason she doesnt trust things I "fix". What happened to for better or worse??

[ToxMox]

Originally Posted by Narflex

Of course now the wife wants a new phone because she doesn't trust this one....not surprising.

Android

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

Android

See I am startle to really dig the w7 phone and think that will be my next upgrade.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by Narflex

Of course now the wife wants a new phone because she doesn't trust this one....not surprising.

[Shamless Plug]Windows Phone would have had all that data saved in the cloud by default... just sayin' [/Shamless Plug]

[vividweb]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

See I am startle to really dig the w7 phone and think that will be my next upgrade.

Me too, but once you are deep in the Apple ecosystem, tough to buy the same apps again for another platform (if they are available). Stories like Narflex's make me second guess my platform choice though.

[panteragstk]

That is why one should back up things that are important. There are too many automatic cloud based backups to not use one. At least use gmail with any platform. Automatically backs up all contact info. Pictures use another app that I can't remember right now. WP7 is growing, but there are still some things that MS needs to work out. Android and iOS are the best bet for phones right now as they are both nice and mature. WP7 will be there if enough adopt the platform. I have high hopes for WP7, but right now it isn't quite there for me. Glad to hear you got what you needed off of the phone. Tell your wife that most issues with phones are software related not hardware, if you update the phone's software you won't have any issues (look who I'm telling)

[Narflex]

I've restored the 3.1.2 firmware on the phone now; then redid the JB so I could redo the SSH trick again and copy back all the important files (various databases, config files, media files). Rebooted and then all is like it used to be. The only concern I had was that when I transferred the files back to the iPhone I did it as user 'root' instead of user 'mobile' (existing files retained their proper ownership; but newly created ones had the wrong user). For some reason I couldn't use SFTP as user mobile; although I could login over ssh as user mobile. And I couldn't find command line utilities over ssh that would allow changing ownership (i.e. chown).

Anyhoo....the phone is just like it was before now. The file permissions thing seems like it might not even be an issue (I'm able to delete pictures that were copied as the wrong user). The wife is now syncing it with iTunes as I type this. I convinced her to keep using this phone since now it seems fine....but if it crashes again then there'll be a new phone purchase.

One thing I've always wondered about though is if just syncing in iTunes does a full backup of the phone's data. At some point years ago I recall reading that you need to actually have it sync your contacts w/ Outlook or some other program in order to retain them; and that the normal phone sync doesn't actually backup stuff like that. But after looking at the backup files iTunes creates I now believe it's doing it all automatically when synced and it doesn't need to be linked to another app. Anyone know the details on this?

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by Narflex

One thing I've always wondered about though is if just syncing in iTunes does a full backup of the phone's data. At some point years ago I recall reading that you need to actually have it sync your contacts w/ Outlook or some other program in order to retain them; and that the normal phone sync doesn't actually backup stuff like that. But after looking at the backup files iTunes creates I now believe it's doing it all automatically when synced and it doesn't need to be linked to another app. Anyone know the details on this?

I did some more research on this again and found the answer on Apple's site. iTunes will do all the backups itself; it doesn't rely on other apps for syncing the information as a backup technique.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766

[Tiki]

One thing to be aware of though is that an iPhone "backup" doesn't backup everything. I found this out the hard way with my wife's iPod touch when she updated the OS.

One of the things it does NOT backup is email. This may seem like it wouldn't matter (most email is stored in the cloud and synched, right?), but my wife was using a POP3 email account from Comcast (they don't offer IMAP). Since she uses her iPod as her main client for email, she had it set to not leave copies of the emails on the server.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is no way to backup email from an iDevice. So, the moral is don't use POP3 email, and if you must, don't use it with an iDevice, and if you must, don't set it to delete the messages from the server after they are downloaded to your iDevice.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Tiki

One thing to be aware of though is that an iPhone "backup" doesn't backup everything. I found this out the hard way with my wife's iPod touch when she updated the OS.

One of the things it does NOT backup is email. This may seem like it wouldn't matter (most email is stored in the cloud and synched, right?), but my wife was using a POP3 email account from Comcast (they don't offer IMAP). Since she uses her iPod as her main client for email, she had it set to not leave copies of the emails on the server.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is no way to backup email from an iDevice. So, the moral is don't use POP3 email, and if you must, don't use it with an iDevice, and if you must, don't set it to delete the messages from the server after they are downloaded to your iDevice.

I wouldn't recommend pop3 for any phone to be honest.

[Fonceur]

Also don't simply trust/rely on those iTunes backup... The iOS 4.0 update of my second generation iPod corrupted the backup (others have had that happen too), so I ended up losing data on it, like my contact list and notes. Since all the media files were stores on the PC, at least those were fine, but it still was a pain. Since then, it also still crashes every time I have a single podcast available for feed (multiple podcasts are fine).

[parkimar]

Configuration profiles don't get saved as part of the backup either.
So if your using one you'll need to reapply using the iphone config utility - or if your corporate whatever MDM solution you have in place.

Cheers

Mark

[ermagana]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

ok sent you the link

Hi, I'm in a similar boat, I've locked my phone up and am trying to follow the instructions on the same video. any chance you can send me the 3GS file you sent before?

Thank you in advance.