Q: Restoring old photos
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Jul 23, 2016 6:12 AMby KiltedTim,It's a little unclear what you have been doing. When you restore an iTunes backup to a phone, you can not selectively restore things... that is, you can not restore the backup except for the photos it contains... it's all or nothing.
Have you been extracting the photos to your computer as you would with any other digital camera? That is, can you view the photos on your PC?
Backups to iTunes are overwritten with each new sync. Backups are intended for disaster recovery, not long term storage (this goes for ANY kind of backup... phone, PC, Datacenter, etc.)
If you have not been extracting and archiving the photos to your PC, it's likely that anything not currently on the phone is long gone.
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Jul 23, 2016 7:59 AMby Bubbles86,HI kiltedtim
sorry for the confusion. Please be patient with me as it's the first time I'm posting here, so I may be a little unclear with my question and explanation .
THere is a chance that after the restoration to the new phone (from a previous back up) I could've deleted ny photos folder due to the fact that my phone memories weren't always the highest . It was mainly for contacts messages etc, to be honest I cannot remember as I done it so many times, to add up the total of photos I've taken in the years I've had iphones could be over 10k, as I constantly took photos of everything. So there couldve been that few times I wiped my photos AFTER my new restoration to save memory as I thought "well at least the photos are still backed up on itunes and I can always retrieve them later" - doES that make sense or have i confused you.
I just want to know if i can go back to , say for example , a back from 2011 and restore it on a blank phone purely for those photos- then somehow transfer the photos on my PC and wipe the phone clear again once those photos are secured on my pc
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Jul 23, 2016 8:06 AMby KiltedTim,It makes sense, thanks. Unfortunately, unless you took steps to preserve the backups, they're most likely long gone. Each backup overwrites the previous backup except in a few specific circumstances.
What that means is that if you backed up a phone, restored the backup to a new phone, deleted the photos from the new phone, then backed that phone up, the backup previously containing the photos most likely no longer exists and the photos are gone.
Going forward, you need to extract the photos from the phone as you would with any digital camera.
Import photos and videos from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support
Alternately, you could use iCloud Photo Library to automatically upload the photos to the cloud.
I'm sorry, but the chances of retrieving your photos are very very slim.
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Jul 23, 2016 8:10 PMby Bubbles86,oH no .. I feel like just crying!! Im currently away so won't be back for another 5 days to go back to my computer and see if what you are saying is true .
i Just assumed it's always saved because fro memory everytime I restored a new phone I can recall reading back ups from previous times .
only time will tell and will update you in a few days
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thank you so much for your time and help
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Jul 24, 2016 6:27 AMby KiltedTim,It depends on how the backups were made. I believe that if you manually click the backup button in iTunes, it may set a restore point that will not be overwritten. If that's the case, you may be able to get some of your photos back provided the files are still out there.
It's going to be tedious, however, as you will have to restore each backup, extract the photos from the phone to the computer, then restore the next backup, etc.
If the backups do exist and are not encrypted, it may be worth looking into 3rd party software designed to extract information from the backups.
