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Restore iPhone from iTunes (Windows) Backup Snapshot folder

In 9/2017 I used iTunes (not sure which version) on Windows 10 to create a local backup of my iPhone SE.
Later that month, I lost that phone. Now I have a new iPhone7 and am trying to restore it from that backup, but iTunes doesn't seem to see the contents of that most recent backup.


iTunes (12.7.1) didn't list a backup dated 9/2017, but did list 3 dated 8/2016. (Of those 3, one folder showed that it had been modified in 9/2017, so I dug through the file structure to investigate further.)


The folder named "Backup" contains a number of different folders, each with a long alphanumeric name.
One of those folders (let's call it BackupA) contains approximately 350 files (including two .plist files) with a date of 8/2016. It also contains a Status.plist file dated 9/2017 and one folder named "Snapshot". The Snapshot folder is ~20GB in size and contains 20,000+ files (but no .plist files), all dated 9/2017.
When I use iTunes to restore my new phone from BackupA, it restores (some?) data from 8/2016 but does not see ANY of the 9/2017 data in the Snapshot folder.


HOURS AND HOURS of time with Senior Technical Support at Apple has gotten me nowhere closer to resolving this. Does anyone have any experience with this, or any thoughts?


(I'm happy to use a 3rd-party solution, if someone can give me some assurance it will work.)

null-OTHER, Windows 10, iTunes for Windows

Posted on Nov 10, 2017 8:42 PM

Reply
1 reply

Nov 20, 2017 11:12 AM in response to hmk123

I finally got the official response from Apple Tech Support.
If the backup is disrupted at any point, iTunes creates this Snapshot folder of the backup. [I'm really not sure why, since they tell me that there is no way to DO anything with the data in the snapshot.]
There is no way to restore from the files in the Backup/Snapshot folder.

Restore iPhone from iTunes (Windows) Backup Snapshot folder

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