iPhone 3gs Date Recovery

Pay a small fortune and send it to a recovery service, or accept that the data is gone for good. Any serious foresincs service never sells their usually proprietary code and tools. They sell their services to recover data. That is far more porfitable than trying to support highly complex (and almost always command line) software that some people have spent their entire careers developing and learning about.

Serious data recovery services are expensive because it is a highly skilled IT speciality. That’s also why most of the commercially available or open source data recovery tools are highly simplistic and largely useless.

I'm sorry this happened to you, I'm sure hindsight is 20/20. You are absolutely right that all the wondershare and drphone stuff is all crap. They are all the same basic software that is a front end for iTunes itself.

The good news is that because it is an iPhone 3gs, the data is not (almost always not) encrypted on the flash memory itself, so forensic chip off recovery may be possible. There is definitely not any kind of DIY or easy solution here. The only path to data would be to desolder the chip from the board, and put it into a reader with a microcontroller matched to the TSOP chip that holds the data. Since the data has been "overwritten" it would be a difficult recovery and it would require destruction of the device to get it. If you are getting seriously expensive quotes in the $2000 range---that means the data recovery is saying "we don't think we can get it" Avoid those. Data recovery guys that do this all the time would do this job at more like speeding ticket prices.

For this job, I would recommend Desert Data Recovery in Phoenix AZ---Tim has recovered a few iPhone 3/3GS for us via chip off method and as a lesser known company he won't charge you and arm and a leg.

Jessa

spgarcia wrote:

If you were the FBI I might agree with you. The data was not encrypted, that I know. What I need is actually forensic software, but so far, the only services that offer such recovery require that I send them the iPhone, but don't sell their software. Their fees are way too high. Just looking for an alternative I may not have yet found.

face the music.. no backup there is nothing to recovery your data from.. as stated you learn a hard lesson..

spgarcia wrote:

Serious problem, of course. My iPhone 5s broke. I borrowed a spare iPhone and replaced the SIM with a new SIM for my old phone number. Activating the phone erased/deleted all of the data on the 3gs. I need to recover that data!! Specifically photos and music. Re-downloading is not possible. Music and photos are person recordings.

In recognition of many people wanting to help, let me state this: It is not helpful to post suggestions or links to software that you don't know works. I have Googled the solar system. First - all free and commercial software for iOS recovery lies to you up front. The ONLY way they can "recover" deleted data is IF you have an iTunes backup. Well, if I had such a backup I wouldn't be here in this predicament. There was NO backup. All free and trial software I have actually tried, about 15 so far, lie to you. See above. Only in the fine print do they say recovery works if you have an iTunes backup.

Positive suggestions or directions are greatly appreciated.

You already know the answer.. Since you failed to BACKUP your data, then there is no way to recover it.

There is no magic that will help you, take it as a lesson learned, and practice backing up your device to icloud or iTunes.