iphone: recover photos and contacts when itunes backup is corrupt/not-compatible
Thought it would be useful to share my experience with an iphone restore failure.
Scenario: my friend did an ios update (she has sworn to never do such a thing again based on this experience). The restore failed and her iphone would not boot up. iTunes said we need to restore. She had an iTunes backup (no iCloud backup) that had been used for a previous restore (i.e. a known good backup). When we attempted to restore, we got this:
I googled this problem, and see that we are not the first to experience this. I chatted with Apple Support and conclusion was "start fresh". I found several open-source tools (iPBA2, iphone Analyzer); but while both showed photos from the backup, neither showed contacts.
I copied the iTunes backup directory to my desktop Linux (CentOs) machine. Browsing in the directory (use the GUI file browser, or run "file *|grep JPEG) I could see all the photos. So I uploaded these to DropBox and gave the link to my friend. Result: I consider this a 100% success at recovering the photos.
Using the Linux "strings" command, I found files that looked like they contained contact list. For example, I knew that I (Tucker) was a contact in her list, so I ran something like:
for i in $(ls)
do
strings $i |grep Tucker > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? == 0 ]
then
echo found Tucker in $i
fi
This identifed a few likely candidates. For each of these files I then ran:
strings <filename> |more
and simply looked at the output. I found a file that had a bunch of names/phone-numbers. I saved the output to a file, ran some scripts to clean it up a bit, and I had a crude recreation of contacts (at least 1 phone number for each contact). I emailed this list of contacts to my friend, and she can now manually re-enter contacts as she sees fit. I can see this file type is sqlite. I tried various experiments reading this and other files with sqlite3, but did not have any success at finding actual contact info. Result: I consider this a partial success,
There are a number of files in the Backup directory which show up as file type "Adaptive Multi-Rate Codec". These appear to be voicemail messages pushed to the phone. I did not care about these. If you open them in the Linux GUI file browser, you can play them back.
Bottom line: Apple Support said "start over". Reality is, with a little effort, you can get back photos (most important, since these cannot be re-created from scratch), and some contacts (less important, since eventually you can re-create this with a little work). Might be other stuff (calendar, ...etc) that can be harvested if you poke around some more.
My recommendations:
1) Set up your phone for both iTunes and iCloud backup
2) Now assume that both your iTunes and your iCloud backups are corrupt. Do not trust them. The only way (to my knowledge) to see if they are good is to restore them to an iphone. Sort of like buying house insurance, and not knowing if it will pay for your damage until the house burns down. If the backups are good, then fantastic. If they are not good, you will have an alternate strategy.
3) Get a flickr account. Set your iphone to sync photos to flickr. flickr offers everyone 1TB free. I like a backup scheme where you can "see" your backup, and have confidence it is really there.
4) Login to icloud. Export your contacts to a file, and make a copy of file on another machine, or to the cloud (googledocs for example). Maybe you can export other stuff. I didn't really care about this, so no comments on that.
5) If all else fails, dissect files on Linux as described above
Comments/flames welcome.