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Undo a restore that deleted all my photos

Please someone help, I accidently restore my iphone and it deleted all my pictures. to make things worse, I did not have backup on nor Icloud on. I was in the process of downloading all my pictures on my computer and my computer asked me to restore my phone. Very bad decision. Is it possible to undo the restore I did?

Posted on Mar 4, 2022 7:42 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 4, 2022 4:30 PM

Not with an iPhone, no. When you restored it, that process destroyed the Secure Enclave encryption keys necessary to decrypt the data. Even if you set it up with the same screen lock passcode, the internal keys will not be the same. So no, all that could be recovered would be encrypted gibberish with no way to decrypt it.

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 4, 2022 4:30 PM in response to LGSBR

Not with an iPhone, no. When you restored it, that process destroyed the Secure Enclave encryption keys necessary to decrypt the data. Even if you set it up with the same screen lock passcode, the internal keys will not be the same. So no, all that could be recovered would be encrypted gibberish with no way to decrypt it.

Mar 5, 2022 6:11 PM in response to LGSBR

Are you sure you didn’t do ANY of these ways of preserving photos and videos?


  • emailed, texted or messaged the photos to friends or family
  • iCloud photo sync
  • iCloud backup
  • iTunes backup
  • Transfer your photos to your computer via USB cable
  • Apple Photo Stream
  • Sync to Google Photos
  • Sync to some other photo archiving service such as Shutterfly
  • Sync to Dropbox
  • Sync to box.com
  • Sync to Microsoft OneDrive
  • Sync to Amazon Photos
  • back up to Livedrive
  • Backup to any other backup or archiving service


A final option is if you synced your photos to iCloud, you have a Mac, and you use Time Machine to back up your Mac automatically, you can open Time Machine and restore the photo library to an earlier date. To do this on your Mac open Finder, then click on Pictures in the sidebar and launch Time Machine. Go to a time before the photos were deleted and restore

Photos Library.photoslibrary. (If you had ever changed the name of the photo library restore that file instead).


If the answer is no to all of the above your photos are gone forever.

Undo a restore that deleted all my photos

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