IPhone 4 – is it possible to do a photo recovery for photos without a previous backup

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I have been using a new iPhone4 (replacement phone) for 2 months. Yesterday I connected it to my laptop to copy over photos. iPhoto said only 1 photo of 500 was imported. So I went to iTunes to import, selected "import all" hoping it would pick up everything. I chose the option "Keep Photos on iPhone" since I wanted to share a few recent photos yet with friends. No luck with the transfer of photos. So then I asked it to sync. Still nothing transfered to the laptop. After I unplugged my phone I noticed the photo library on the iPhone had changed. All the pictures I had taken were simply gone, and photos from prior to 2 months ago were in their place. It had restored a previous backup rather than transfer the new photos. I hadn't clicked "delete" photos but I think it just did it as part of restore sync. Is there any possible way to recover the pictures now — after a restore, without any previous backup?

Best Answer

Before a sync or restore, I believe that iTunes will create a backup of your phone's contents (unless you manually cancel this backup). The backup will contain the photos and videos that were on the phone.

You can check if a backup was created by doing the following:

  1. Launch iTunes
  2. iTunes > Preferences > Devices
  3. See if there is an entry with the date of the restore.

If a backup exists, you can recover your data with one of two methods:

  • Restore your phone using that backup; or
  • Use an application such as iPhone Backup Extractor to extract the images out of the backup file.
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