Undo a restore?

With such important content surely you made frequent backups. There is no way to undo the Restore, but you can restore the backup you must have made of your computer, then restore those images. There are other possibilities:

• If you had turned on iCloud Photos in Settings on the phone all of the photos are still in iCloud. If you turn on iCloud photos they will come back to the phone. You can check by logging in to https://icloud.com on any computer using your Apple ID and password.
• If you had a recent backup of the phone made before you accidentally did the Restore you can just restore that to the phone. (BTW, the "somehow" is that you accidentally clicked Restore Backup instead of Backup Now - Restores are never defaulted in iTunes)
• If you transferred your photos to your computer via a USB cable they are still on your computer, and can be restored to the phone in any of several ways. The easiest is iCloud Photos, especially if you have a Mac.
• Did you sync your photos to a 3rd party service to share them (e.g., Google Photos, Yahoo Photos, Shutterfly, etc)

Hi Brian,

I was trying to retrieve some messages that were accidentally deleted. I tried to restore back-up through iTunes, but in my haste backed up from 2016. How do I safely undo this back to content I had earlier today? My last iCloud back-up was the 27th of December, which would be just fine.

THANK You for your help.

Have you not been importing pics to your computer regularly?

Unless you have a backup from when your pics were there, they are gone.

You should be importing them to your computer regularly as you would with any digital camera. The iPhone is designed to be storage for your content.It simply allows your content to be portable.

You can not "undo" a restore. Apparently, you did not stop to read the dialog box asking you what you wanted to do before clicking.

IF you had iCloud backups turned on, you can restore the phone from the iCloud backup by erasing it, and selecting to restore from iCloud. If you did not, and you did not have the data synced to a cloud service, then it's gone.

I can understand you’re devistated but given how valuable these pictures were, why were they not backed up and archived, in multiple places? What if you’d just lost your phone, or dropped it and it broke, or it fell in the sink? There are countless ways you could have lost that data before this.

Relying on any single source electronic storage device for valuable, critical, vital data or files is simply a disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, that data is going to be lost unless backed up and/or archived somewhere else.

My family photos are sync’d to my Mac’s Photo library which is backed up in Time Machine and two hard drive clones. They are also sync’d to two other iOS devices as well. You can also use both iCloud Photo Library to sync photos across your devices as well as online free archival sites like Dropbox or google photos. There simply is never any need to ever even risk losing valuable photos.

From the situation you describe, and without a recent up to date backup already in place, sorry, but your photos are gone for good now.

Hi

If you had iCloud backup turned on before problems then when you charge an iphone it should be automatically backed up to iCloud Over your wifi when you set a new iPhone up over your wifi it will ask if you want to use iCloud backup Say yes to get your apps and data back this will only work if iCloud backup was turned on before problems.

If you have a ipad you can use iCloud backup from ipad but iPhone & ipad must be running the latest ios 11.2.1

Cheers

Brian 🇬-1F1E7;

If you are concerned about photos missing an alternative is if you use a gmail account you have google photos. All your photos will be in Google photos if you have a gmail account. But you must have accessed a gmail account on your phone. That’s one option. Hope this helps. But once you have restored a phone there’s no getting back that info if you didn’t back up your phone.

Go to Settings/General/Reset - erase all content and settings. When it completes, you will be prompted to restore a backup and given the choice of iTunes or iCloud.