IPhone – Restoring iPhone’s state from a dd hard drive image

backupiphonejailbreakrestore

This article, Recover Lost Data From Your iPhone, in its "Method 1" suggests a promising method to backup iPhone's entire state, that is iOS settings, apps, email settings, media files, that is everything to the least detail, using Unix/Linux dd utility that makes an image of the iPhone's hard drive. This allows treating iPhone backups akin to snapshots of a virtual machine or global restore points, which is very useful. However, despite of the article's title, it doesn't explain how to actually restore an iPhone's state from a file produced by dd utility.

Any ideas how to restore from dd hard drive images? Or maybe suggestions about better methods to save/restore iPhone's entire state?

Best Answer

You'll need to JailBreak the device before restoring. Then you'll need to go through the same process you took to create the image, except the values of the if and of arguments will need to be swapped.

Additional Reading

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IOS – Every single iPhone backup has disappeared – from PC and from iCloud

I don't have a great answer - but this is fairly serious so I'm going to start an answer and hope someone else edits or answers if they can spot something I haven't.

On the computer, the only "red flag" would be if you wiped the phone of all content and settings, named it exactly the same name as it was before (which could be iPhone) and then backed up again and overwrote the backup with the actual data. iTunes tries hard to prevent this and spawn off a date-protected backup when it detects this, but I've seen this check fail and people lose backups from time to time. The remedy here is to restore the PC from a backup that has whatever MobileSync folder is the most recent.

On iCloud - you also shouldn't be able to overwrite a "full" backup with an empty one. Also, iCloud explicitly keeps several versions of the backups going back in roughly day intervals. It also normally stores backups for different devices without collisions or overwriting another backup.

The good news on iCloud is you can always get help from Apple at http://www.apple.com/support/icloud/ and from retail stores. New devices or ones covered by Apple Care also have phone or web support in most countries. All new Apple products have a 90 day window of set up help. Hopefully one of these can step in and assist. Not only does Apple get a data point where their tools let you down (and exactly what circumstances this happened) - they also see many people in this situation and will hopefully waste a minimum of your time getting this sorted.

IPhone – Restoring from Backup error – cannot be saved to computer

This may also be a software issue, you can attempt getting your iPhone into DFU Mode in order to restore not only your contects...etc... but also reinstall iOS (as it may have installed incorrectly).

As it is stated at this webpage:
"

Entering DFU Mode (Official Instructions)

Plug your device into your computer.
Turn off the device.
Hold the Power button for 3 seconds
Hold the Home button without releasing the Power button for 10 seconds
Release the Power Button but keep holding the Home button
Keep holding the Home button until you are alerted by iTunes saying that it has detected a device in Recovery Mode

Then you should be able to click the restore button, and restore correctly.

Hope this helps.

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IOS – Every single iPhone backup has disappeared – from PC and from iCloud

IPhone – Restoring from Backup error – cannot be saved to computer

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