Restore iPhone from older backup

Every backup replaces the old one, exept those backups you use to restore your phone from, these are marked with a time stamp and will not be replaced by iTunes.

The only hope would be, if you included the iphone backup folder into your computer backup routine and would be able to restore that folder again. After that your old backup would be present in the list again.

More info about the location of that folder for your computer and how to do this can be found here: iPhone and iPod touch: About backups

Only one normal iPhone backup is kept by iTunes, it's actually an incremental backup in that only data that has changed is actually backed up. The other backups you see listed for your phone, that are time/date stamped, are backups from restore points. These backups are not overwritten. Unless you regularly backup your computer, and thus would be able to restore your iPhone backup from one of your computer backups, I'm afraid your data is gone.

You have hope. You need to turn on "Show All Hidden Files & Folders" to see the iPhone backup. Then use Time Machine to restore an earlier iphone backup. Then restore from that backup.

I had something similar and managed to restore my text messages! You can see what previous back ups you have by opening Itunes and go to edit at the top, then preferences then devices and you can see what back ups you have.

Then plug the phone in and on the left where it comes up as "Name IPhone" right click on it and then go to restore to back up and choose the option you want to roll back to.

This will obviously delete anything since then, luckily for me this was only a couple of days of info which was worth losing to get two years of memories back!

itunes is such a piece of garage

'why can't it be easy to use with drag and drop intstead of a heavily blotted interface that still lack functionality

I can see my restore file in preferecec, but can't select it for restore

OMG! Thank you! you just saved everything for me!

Hi,

I had the same problem. Maybe this will help. Plug your iphone into itunes and right click on the device in the side menu. Select "restore from backup". I was able to restore my iphone to an earlier backup than the most recent. All myt contacts, texts, music and email data was restored. I am using a PC, although I don't think it makes much difference.

Hope this helps.

Sean

I have this problem also. Had other issues with this phone, but this takes the biscuit. I am currently on holiday, and this restore has just erased all holiday snaps + vital contacts. Never have been a fan of apple, following this experience I am now looking at a Samsung Galaxy. This is unforgivable, I feel like throwing this thing against the wall, I am not sure I can bring myself to sell it, as I feel I would be passing a poison chalice. For the time being, I'm going back to my Blackberry.

Hello. Having similar issues w/a twist...

I have an older backup... sitting right there in the Backup folder.... however.. iTunes refuses to see it.

Background:

• upgraded iPhone 4 from 5.1.1 to 6.1.2

• upgrade went smoothly, and all data transferred fine to the phone.

• problem - not a single phone number field on the iPhone.

• eventually resorted to restoring the iPhone again (to 6.1.2), but this time there was a backup just prior the restore (even though I selected do not back up).

Now when trying to backup, iTunes only sees the empty backup just performed. I have deleted the empty backup folder with no luck. When restoring from backup, the pulldown menu only shows the empty backup, not the good backup sitting right there in the same folder.

Any ideas? Deleting pref file?

Ignore / Delete post: User error on my part.... deleted the wrong backup file. Not seeing the function to delete or edit the post.

So let me see if I understand this. Something happens to my phone, and data (in my case most of contact list "disapeared" in the last few days (not sure when). So in order to try and restore, I connect to iTunes, that backs up the current, hosed contact list. So I go to restore, and what do I get back? I have been in software development for over 20 years and this is, without a doubt, the stupidest thing I have ever heard of!

I was helping out my friend to restore his iPhone from his iPhone backup on his PC. Unfortunately, his iPhone backup was somehow corrupted and couldn't be restored.

Luckily, when we set up his computer, we made a copy of iPhone backup and store it in an external drive.

We were able to restore his iPhone from an old backup that has all his contacts!

I would recommend you make a backup of your iPhone backup occasionally for double protection!