I upgraded my Idevice & set my old one in the safe until I got around to saving the pictures & selling the phone & yesterday I tried to get my photos off & realized I left a password on it & have tried to remember it & cant remember it. Unfortunatley its not been backed up for a very long time & we have taken a couple of vacations since then in which I took allot of family pics & videos. I was able to jailbreak it last night but its a tethered update so I was unable to SSH into the phone & if I put it in DFU to restore it will wipe all my photos etc... any help greatly appreciated.

This used to be a valid forum for these kinds of questions & Im very surprised that ive had 96 views to this question & not one response.

Search around, you'll find multiple posts on the forum with people explaining that it is not possible to bypass the passcode lock through standard methods any more like it used to be, and in most cases the phones are not in a state where any of the workarounds are available to retrieve the data. The only easy thing you could do would be to SSH the pictures off if you already had SSH access to the phone, but you already knew this and do not have SSH access to the phone right now.

Putting the phone into DFU just puts the phone into DFU, the restore is what wipes the OS. By itself, it makes no change to the OS. You can then use FixRecovery/TinyUmbrella/redsn0w to kick the phone out of DFU and back into regular mode if you don't complete the restore. The problem is that DFU mode doesn't provide a solution to this problem that I'm aware of yet either.

In any case, even if it was an untethered jailbreak, you wouldn't be able to unlock the phone to install SSH and start the SSH daemon, and by default it's not installed and not running, so I don't believe that would impact your problem at all.

I hate to say it, and you probably already know it, but the only real answer I know of for you is to remember the passcode...