There are a million ways to lose your iPhone data, but as you search online, in mild panic, looking for ways to recover deleted pictures or lost contacts, it may seem like there is no single way to get them back.
We store an impressive amount of data on our iPhones every day: photos, music, videos, SMS messages and attachments, notes, reminders, call history, voice memos, Safari bookmarks, and much more. All of them can be deleted, either on purpose or by accident, only to realize it was a mistake, a moment too late. Unfortunately, the iPhone does not have a “recycle bin” where deleted data goes.
And, if you get hit with bad luck, you can lose all your data at once: one moment you’re updating your iPhone, the next moment all you know is that the update apparently failed and your iPhone is now dead. for all purposes.
Sometimes people do stupid things, like resetting their phone to factory settings, without making a backup beforehand. Whoops, all your data has now been wiped! Things can go wrong when attempting a jailbreak. People forget their lock screen passwords. Your phone may be lost, stolen, or damaged. Sooner or later, your device will simply die, with the Apple logo screen of death or an inaccessible system error.
If any of this happens to you, it is important that you stop using the phone immediately. Any operation can generate new data that can overwrite lost data, making it difficult to recover. That’s why you’re advised not to sync your iPhone with iTunes in this situation: you don’t want your backup data to be updated. Put iPhone in airplane mode before trying to recover data. Do not try to continually reboot, that can only cause more data corruption.
If you ever synced your iPhone with iTunes, you can use iTunes backup to recover old data. iPhone has a built-in data recovery feature. This data recovery tool is worth trying when there is no backup. If that doesn’t work either, you can use third-party software to directly scan and try to recover data from your iPhone. There are even tools that can restore your settings, which you have spent hours configuring.
The iPhone hard drive is similar to your computer hard drive: data is never permanently deleted, but only marked for overwriting. Using the right tools, in many cases, you can recover all your deleted or lost data.