Q: Updated to iOs5 lost everything! Help?

I too have lost all my camera roll pix. Following your suggestions, but I can't even locate "events" in Photos? And it appears that I am signed into Icloud all the time. Don't see a seperate login or logout of it.

I may be a newbie here, so if you could give me some more details, I would appreciate it. BTW I am using a 3GS Iphone.

I have an iphone 4, and don't know if what worked for me will work on iphone 3. 

You might try repowering your phone and then signing out and signing back into icloud again - go to settings and find icloud there. 

In photo, I found several choices such as album, events, etc.  I had to hunt around but my pics started to load into events - it took awhile for them all to load up.  They didn't look right until I re-powered my phone again.

It's possible you will be able to restore from a backup to recover your data, check in the preferences.

Mac: iTunes > Preferences > Devices > Big white box will list backups

PC: Edit > Preferences > Devices > Big white box will list backups

If you have a backup from before you lost the data, close out of the preferences screen and right click on your iPhone under devices on the left hand side and choose restore from the backup.  Make sure to select the backup that occurred before the data loss.

I have a similar situation. I have an iPod, not the iPhone, but I did the update and I lost EVERYTHING!! I tried to backup, and was only able to retrieve my pictures. I've only had this iPod since Christmas, so I am maybe not very familiar with iTunes or how to use this, but if I did the backup, shouldn't that have put everything back on my iPod? Not just the pictures? I had nearly 60GB of music and audiobooks on there. GONE!

What am I supposed to do? Re-buy everything? Is Apple going to reimburse me for this this? (yeah right)

Any answers? Please??

We found a solution.

On your IPhone/IPod go to the app store, then click updates.

There should be a box that you can touch that says PURCHASED.

Under PURCHASED you select Not On This Phone.

All your apps should be there.

Unfortunately, you will have to update one app at time.

Hope this helps!!!!!!!!!

Apple just ruined my life....Updated to IOS 5, and lost all photos, music, vids, although I was able to recover my contacts. Music (500+ songs) and Videos(10GB) GONE!!!!! Really missin JOBS right now... Any idea for how to recover these things???

Glad some are recovering contacts, music, apps, etc. But, my greatest issue is recovering messages. Any idea of how to do that? Can't do backups prior to ios 5. Either says they are corrupt, or -50 error message. HELP!

heres my story:

wanted to get the iOS 5 update for my iPhone 4. Went to download it, but needed an iTunes update too. Updated iTunes, but I had to delete a ton of files from my laptop because it's so full. It finally worked, then went to download iOS 5. When I plugged in my iPhone it wouldn't do the backup because my laptop was full (although I had enough memory left for the backup) but now my iTunes is trying to act as though the backup was completed. I went out to dinner, came back, and tried again. I found an article saying to perform a system restore and then using a backup. I performed the restore, then tried to do the backup. i figured even if my last backup didnt work, my backup before was a week ago and would be just fine. yeah, no. i lost all of my information. contacts, texts, music, video, PICTURES! (the pictures really made me mad because one of my really good friends went to rehab for almost a year, i just saw him for the first time last week and the only picture i have with him from then was only on my iPhone.) i lost it all. I'm so mad. It's acting as though my last backup was this afternoon when I first attempted the iOS 5 update, but when I go to restore it and back it up it says my memory is full, even though I just spent the last hour removing 100s of MB from my computer. When I try to restore from a backup it says: "iTunes could not restore the phone ' ___'s iPhone' because the backup could not be saved on the computer." what does this mean????? how do i fix it??? i just want my phone back!!! HELP ME PLEASE!!! I HAVE SO MUCH INFORMATION THATS JUST GONE NOW! i'm going to cry. i didnt realize how much i depended on my iPhone, and i dont even care if its iOS 4, this update is not worth it and i want my phone back, asap.

I have an iPhone 4 that I ran the iOS 5 update on today.  Like a few of you, I manually backed up my iPhone first.  Everything seemed to be going fine until the iPhone rebooted after installing the update and the progress bar that was going across as it reloaded the phone stalled out at about 30 percent. 

I'm not known for my patience but when it comes to an update, I try to control myself and just leave it alone.  But, after the bar didn't move for more than an hour and iTunes didn't show any indication of iPhone activity (there wasn't a synch in progress for example), I started to interfere.

I thought maybe I should click on Sync to get it going again but that didn't work.  I tried restoring the backup but received an error saying it couldn't do that.  I was able to restore the iPhone to factory condition, which of course wipes it clean, but when I tried to restore it from the backup after that it acted like it would work but the progress bar on the iPhone stalled out on me.

After messing with this off and on for about 8 hours, I decided to restore the phone to factory settings and then set it up as if it were a new phone.  I used the same name I had before and am in the process now of syncing it up from scratch.

I didn't have any photos on the camera roll so I lucked out there.  I make it a habit to off load the pics of the roll often.  The pictures I want to keep on the phone are off loaded, then I put them into folders in a directory that I sync to.  So all of those are located on my Mac and have already copied back over to folders during the sync I am currently running.

The apps are copying back now so those will be on the phone...nothing lost except for any settings I may have had in them.  Luckily I don't think that will be a big deal for me.  There will be some tweaking to do but nothing super vital.

My contacts are synced up with my Mac address book and those are all there still.  Also, I've found keeping my contacts in a Gmail account which I sync to my iPhone is the way to go so I know those are still intact.

I'll have to pick which music, books, and videos I want to sync but at least they are in iTunes still.

The biggest pain will be having to set up the email accounts that I had in there but again, not the end of the world...the data will be there once I set them up.

To sum up...

1.  Apple should make this update process way more stable than it seems to be.

2.  Installing this update has taken several hours and caused data loss and inconvenience.

3.  On the plus side, restoring to factory condition then setting up the phone seems to work to get things going again but it will take some time to set up.  At least I have my music, videos, books, and contacts still.

After a couple of days of screwing with this I bit the bullet.

I opened the phones as if it were a thumbdrive, drilled down and found the folder that held my pics and made a copy on my desktop

Running Win7 64, I decided to purge all things Apple from the machine using the "add/remove programs" function, and then deleted the orphan folders (you must set the UAC to "none" in order to delete some of the folders) Then I rebooted and found my DVD burning program was now working.  Hmmmmm.

After checking to ensure all traces of things Apple were deleted, I downloaded and installed a new copy of iTunes, redownloaded all my apps and books, and imported my 1500 song library (all ripped from my old CD'd, mostly classical)

Everything except iBooks seems to be working, but let's see if it survives a pc reboot.

More tomorrow. . .

The only question now is Galaxy sII or Nexus?

I also got the message "an error occured while restoring this iphone (-69)" while the upgrading, and all of my files gone!!!...

The solution is: (It`s worked!!!):

1. reset the iphone by the sleep/awake buttom on top of the device + the home button hold them together at the same time for 10-15 sec, till rebooting the iphone.

2. wait for the end of the rebooting, and start the all process of the upgrade from the beggining.

3. if you asked for, choose the oldest backup file that saved on your computer. (the backup file saved at: c:/ documents / your comp name/ application data/ apple computer / mobilesync/backup/ THE FILE + DATE

good luck!!

I've updated since the first IOS of the IPAD1, but this is just outregeous, I've lost everything and I haven't found one solution by apple, not one on the problem that many are having.

Why can i not go back to 4.3.3? give me ma backup back.

I don't think it's normal that I should go through endless blogs and forums and not find a solution from the ones who created the problem in the first place.

I just found out that itunes deleted my old backup completelly and put a new one on it! LOST LOST LOST

This needs a few lawyers!

Been there, done that, and unfortunately, it did NOT work for me:-(

If Apple is refusing to address this SNAFU, I agree with peterfrommadrid. Maybe litigation IS the answer?

Had restore error -50.  Restored to previous backup, but lost about 4 weeks worth of app data.  Now after syncing both to iCloud and the computer for the past week, and rebuilding things to the way they were, I found my iTunes music library wiped today.  Furthermore, iTunes doesn't remember that I have always synced music with this computer and indicates that my iPhone's music will be replaced with the music library if I sync.

What happened???