Hi
last night i used absinthe to jailbreak my 4s. firstly i backed up my phone in itunes, went through the process and all worked fine. when i went back into itunes and it says restore from backup there wasnt the latest backup in the drop down list, the most recent back up was from 3 months ago. i located the most recent backup in the following directory Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup and can see there is one from yday in there. but it dosent show up on the list in itunes. is there a way of choosing this latest backup to restore from? can someone help me as i dont want to lose the last 3 months of info from my phone?

thanks

Side note, Absinthe does not reflash the user data partition, nor does it actually flash the device -- so the jailbreak should not have impacted any of your user data. Beyond that, since the 4S came with iOS 5 and the upgrade from 5.0 to 5.0.1 was an OTA Delta, you really shouldn't have lost any data in the upgrade and jailbreak process.

Regardless, as it seems you did -- there are a couple ways to try and work around this. If the backup shows up in the list of backups on your computer but doesn't allow you to pick it when you right-click on the device to restore, this can be because of corrupt metadata in the backup. Depending on the data you're trying to restore, you can use something like the iPhone Backup Extractor to pull the databases you want (contacts, SMS, etc.) and migrate them to the new phone. Other data like Application Data will be a little more difficult.

Alternately, people recommend moving everything from the iTunes Backup folder to a different folder, then creating a new backup, verifying that the backup is created, then overwriting the newly created and working backup with the backup you want to restore, then restoring.

Good luck!