Urgent help needed: Recovering photos after accidentally erasing iPhone's internal storage

dritan176 wrote:

I accidentally selected “Erase All Content and Settings” on my iPhone. I had approximately 5 GB of photos stored in iCloud, but thousands of other personal photos were stored only on my iPhone and were not backed up.

Those thousands of other photos that existed only on your phone are gone.

I'm afraid not. Without a back up this material is now gone.

Accidentally erasing an iPhone means permanent and irrecoverable data deletion.

That’s the whole point of erasing.

There is no recovery, no tools, nothing.

The erased data is gone.

Your sole option for those photos are copies that exist elsewhere; whether in existing backups elsewhere, or copies of the photos and files that were created prior to erasing the iPhone, or copies the senders preserved.

Many of us have lost our data, and we didn’t have backups. It’s not a club anyone would ever want to join, but many of us have. For those of you reading that haven't joined us, please have backups of your important data.

MrHoffman wrote: …Many of us have lost our data, and we didn’t have backups. It’s not a club anyone would ever want to join, but many of us have. For those of you reading that haven't joined us, please have backups of your important data.

I didn't know! Do we get a membership card? Is there a secret handshake? I must have been a member of this club for decades!

Richard.Taylor wrote:

MrHoffman wrote: …Many of us have lost our data, and we didn’t have backups. It’s not a club anyone would ever want to join, but many of us have. For those of you reading that haven't joined us, please have backups of your important data.

I didn't know! Do we get a membership card? Is there a secret handshake? I must have been a member of this club for decades!

Our local data-loss club moto, in escalating order of effort and cost and increasing data value:

• “The only way to mark data as valuable is with backups.”

• “Have you tried restoring your backups?”

• “What happens when the recovery fails, right when you need it most?”

Expert data-protection levels include redundancy and geographic hardware distribution and disaster tolerance implementations. This in response to outage costs measured in millions of dollars per hour, or sometimes even per minute. Yes, such systems and such costs exist.

And the expert levels also include implementations and practices that will default-block any duly-authorized single individual from clobbering production data, whether accidentally or maliciously, absent some exploit. This whether using two-password or two-passkey authentication schemes, or otherwise.

Members of the data-loss club are fun at parties. 😉

MrHoffman wrote: Members of the data-loss club are fun at parties. 😉

I can see that.