iPhone backup missing ... and finally found under Administrator account

Hi there,

if you somehow miss a backup of your iPhone/iPad that you made using iTunes, there's a chance it might be still out there.

That happened to me two years ago:

I wanted to backup my iPhone before performing an OTA update. So I started iTunes on my Windows PC and performed the backup. However, prior to the backup I had to update iTunes. This required Administrator privileges (I'm working on my PC using a "regular" user account, i.e. an account different from Administrator and without elevated privileges) and so the backup was performed running as Administrator. I was not aware of this at that time. I checked that the backup had succeeded by confirming that iTunes offered me to restore the backup that I generated before.

After the OTA update my iPhone was stuck in a boot loop. When I tried to restore the backup (as "regular" user") it could not be found. That was strange as I had checked that the backup had been successful. Sadly, even the very friendly Apple support could not find it (using remote access). I was quite unhappy as I seemingly had lost one year of photo data.

Fast forward to today. While cleaning up data on my SSD, I found a big blob of data. Closer inspection revealed that it's an two year old iPhone backup stored under Administrator account. Wow. A new hope🎈 . After I restored it to the iPhone, my long-lost data was there again. 😁👍

Lesson learned: in case you are missing an iTunes backup, do not just search in your user's "%appdata%" directory but consider other user's iTunes directory, too.