IOS – possibility to recover rewritten backup copy of an iPhone from iTunes

Usually the backups are stored in this location:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

Just hop into TimeMachine or whatever your backup solution is and restore the contents of that folder.

Digging into these files is hit or miss and based on the version of iTunes and encryption settings, they may only be understood by iTunes. There is no easy way to get specific info (like contacts or calendars) from these files. Besides the name of the files are random numbers and letters, so good luck making sense of that...

As to the initial dilemma, I don't really understand what happened. iTunes never deleted a backup, unless I did it manually in the Preferences. Do you see some backup files in iTunes Preferences > Devices, especially ones dating before the upgrade to iOS 5? I find it very odd that in the middle of the upgrade it would decide to destroy such important data.

Do you have a Time Machine backup? Were you subscribing to a sync service like MobileMe, or Google where your contacts and other stuff like that would still be?

And how did you delete the backup files actually? Did you do it manually or the OS asked your permission to do it?

[I realize this is an older question and may not solve the problem for the OP, but this answer is intended to provide guidance to others.]

If you use iTunes backups, there is only one backup (the latest) maintained per device at any point in time. So in this case the new backup overwrote the older backup, and it would be possible to recover only if a copy of ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ was made before the clean install (through Time Machine or any other solution), restoring that folder on the system and doing a restore from iTunes.

You can see the device backups (with the timestamps) available in iTunes by going to iTunes → Preferences and then navigating to the Devices tab.

Some recommendations and points to note to avoid such a situation and have something to fall back to:

• You can have multiple backups in iCloud for a device and choose which backup to restore from (assuming there are no device/iOS compatibility issues).
• Use both iCloud and iTunes backups together (once iCloud backup is turned on, automatic backups in iTunes would be turned off; so a manual backup would have to be triggered in iTunes).
• When using iTunes backup, trigger a manual backup in iTunes followed by a manual backup in Time Machine before major changes to a device, like re-installing iOS or jailbreaking or recovering from older backups.

See: Choosing an iOS backup method (Should I use iTunes or iCloud to back up my iOS device?)