I wanted to share my experience of data recovery.

I went through a few 1.1.1->1.1.3 upgrade runs on my phone. The upgrades were all successful. But in the end I found out that somehow I lost all my data when I went through the process. I think at one point I had selected Restore instead of Update in iTunes when I did the 1.1.2, but it's all kind of a blur.

On one of the upgrade runs while I was at 1.1.2 I connected to iTunes and it saw the phone as "untitled phone" and asked if I wanted to create a new phone profile or restore a backup. I went with a new phone profile and then did a sync. Bad idea because it replaced my previous good backup with all my data. I didn't catch that until it was too late.

Anyway after the 1.1.3 upgrade I attached the phone to iTunes again and it didn't recognize it so when it asked if I wanted to restore from backup, I thought, cool I'll just get my data back. Well it restored the the useless backup and it updated my phone's firmware OS and BB!

I thought I was hosed because I hadn't heard any success stories of unlocking 4.03.13G baseband. Fortunately, I used the anySIM 1.3 Beta and got things working on 1.1.3 with the new baseband. But still I was without my data and the backup iTunes had was useless.

Well, remembered I had a backup image of my hard drive from a day ago that still would have a current backup of the iPhone data. But what could I do with that? I scoured the forums in the usual places and found some info about getting data out of the .mdbackup files using converters and python scripts.

Eventually I came up with the idea to just drop into the iPhone backup folder into "C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup", its the one with the iPhone hash string 5adur9osjfa09875a4... whatever. When I opened iTunes again and went to Edit| Preferences| Syncing tab I saw it found the old (good) backup.

Then on the iPhone I just did a Settings | General | Reset | Erase All Content and Settings. The next time I plugged in the phone into iTunes it asked if I wanted to restore from my good backup and I let it do it. It worked this time and I have all my data back. Hooray!

I hope this helps someone out there who stumbles around with their iPhone update like I did.

jonatj

dude! you rock!

I went to update my iphone to 1.1.3, and in the process, synced to a new and empty 'backup'.

I thought all was lost until I discovered a nifty feature in vista.

Right-clicked the backup folder, yeah the one that looks like a mac addy. Found the previous versions tab. Restored to an eariler date and behold! Back in business!

To make sure i won't have this sh*t again, I will make backups on top vista's.

thank you so much for this hint

Was this done on a PC or MAC? I dont see this path on my Vista PC

"C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup", i

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3G iPhone 8GB (soon to be unlocked, hopefully)

I have run into something similar...

I was having problems with my phone occasionally crashing in 1.1.3 (it is JB and Unlocked)
I restored in iTunes
Used the MMI Zibri GUI to Activate and JB.

Afterwards, fired up iTunes...it was restoring from a fresh iPhone backup I made (i.e. my notes, sms)... restore from backup failed, it restarted my iphone, proceeded to sync and then create a new backup, replacing my old backup.

Looking at it now, I have my SMS which is kind of nice, but not as important as my notes (I will check if it still has my stock, weather, etc. settings) it also brought over my webclips. I really want to get my notes back and go to this original backup...



11:00PM backup - the one I want
11:22PM and later - crappy backups

I tried moving the 11:22 and later files to another directory, relaunch iTunes. Would not recognize the backup at all and wanted to create a new Phone name. It really also wants the Manifest.plist and Info.plist to match up with the timestamp, but I don't think it will work.

Time Machine is not backing this folder up, so I have another problem from that. Any suggestions for getting at my notes from the backup folder itself (~/Library/Application Support/Mobile Sync/...)

I tried MobileSyncBrowser but it will not let me drag and drop the backup files stored on the computer to get my notes. Any ideas?


Update: wifi passwords gone, stocks gone, weather settings remained, youtube favorites gone

Anyone know how to recover these guys?