Aidan Fitzpatrick
Posted by Aidan Fitzpatrick,

This post was updated in May 2017

Let's suppose you've lost some of the information from your iPhone and you want to get it back. (Perhaps you were upgrading to a new version of iOS and something went wrong or you simply deleted some contacts, photos or notes by mistake.)

1. Is it in your iPhone Backup?

First, you'll want to see whether the information you need is stashed safely away in the backup that iTunes keeps of your iPhone. Our iPhone Backup Extractor tool is a handy way to see what's in your iPhone backup.

2. Extract the information you need

Using the iPhone Backup Extractor it's simple to extract the information you need, out of the backup and into a standard file format such as CSV or VCard. Here are some guides on recovering specific information:

3. Get your information back onto your iPhone

This is probably the trickiest step. Apple lock down their phones so getting information back onto them isn't easy. We have a few guides that might help you with specific types of data:

Restoring other data to your iPhone can be difficult without technical know-how. Depending on the type of file, we've listed below some more advanced tricks to try in order to get data back onto a phone. We cannot endorse or guarantee any of these methods, and they may break your phone:

  • Save your old iTunes backup somewhere, get iTunes to take a new backup of your upgraded phone, then patch the new backup with files from the old backup and restore the new backup onto the phone.
  • Jailbreak the iPhone, SSH in and manually update the databases with SQLite
  • Jailbreak the iPhone and replace the files manually with SCP
  • Install third-party sync software such as Syphone (Mac only)
  • Install a Wifi "shared drive" app (AirShare, DataCase, etc.) on the iPhone and try to replace the files directly

If you have any other tips, then please let us know in the comments. Happy restoring!

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