My iphone 5 IOS 8.1.2 (the next to the last version) crashed and iTunes says it needs a restore. But I just got back from a trip and have hundreds of new photos and videos on it. How can I restore it but also save the photos and videos? Unfortunately, I have nothing from the trip on photostream.
iPhone 5, iOS 8.1.2, null
You cannot.
Backups need to occur before catastrophes. They cannot occur after catastrophes.
But if you saved your photos to Photo Stream or iCloud Photo Library (Beta) while your iPhone was working, you should still have them.
the iphone is not listed under devices in ITunes. I have a 64GB iphone and because of the size, I was never able to back up to my macbook Air using iTunes. Instead, I have occasionally manually copied photos off the phone using diskaid (now iMazing). I have hoped that icloud would take care of the rest. While it looks like notes and calendar entries are current on my macbook air, the photostream has not updated since November last year...
The longer story is that I tried to restore my iphone using iMazing to a new phone after the battery swelled in my old iphone. The apple service agent in Pune, India gave me a new iphone. Everything seemed to work except the phone app would not save any call history and had lost my old call history. When I asked an apple "genius" informally what to do, he suggested to reset the settings. I did this last night and it did not fix the problem with the missing call history. In addition to losing my desktop picture, one annoyance was that it did cause me to lose my saved wifi passwords not only on the phone but also on my Macbook Air (I realized this after I plugged in the crashed iphone this morning--itunes said it was not connected to the internet, so I even had to reenter my home wifi password).
When Itunes said reset did not work and I should restore, I tried to open the phone with iMazing. iMazing was able to see the phone (but didn't recognize it as my iphone--just named it generically as "iPhone" but could not load any data and after a few minutes of waiting would stop and say the phone was disconnected. After that the phone stopped showing the cable/iTunes picture. Now any time I plug in the iphone it lights up with the white apple in the middle of the screen for about 5 minutes then turns off again...
I found an app called "Wondershare Dr. Fone for IOS" via bing search. Is it unwise/reasonable to try this?
I found an icloud backup file from Jan 27. But how do I access it if the phone is not starting? Would this have photos or videos?
Dear Seth,
Thanks for your previous reply!
Here's an update: Thankfully Photostream actually has been working. It is updating on my ipad as we speak and all recent photos are showing up--even those from last night. So I think that I will have no regrets with any other data loss at this point as my contacts, notes, and calendar have been syncing themselves across all my devices all along anyway. Email and 1Password are continuously backed-up by those apps, right? So at this point I will go ahead and restore. Does that sound right?
iphone crashed and needs restore. how can i save photos
