Recovering Iphone 4 Photos

[deidrett]

*Sigh* Goodnight all,
To cut a very long story short, I travelled recently and took amazing shots with my Iphone. When I finally got home, I connected my Jailbroken Iphone to my Windows Vista laptop where it automatically synced and deleted all my photos. I've been searching around the net and saw that there ARE ways to recover the files if they have not yet been overwritten, even without a backup!

See HOW TO: iPhone Data Recovery

The guide however is apparently beyond my technical understanding and also seems to be directed to the Mac user and not the Windows user. Can anyone break down this process a lot for me?? I haven't even moved beyond Pinging :/

Additionally, I've downloaded Iphone Explorer, Stellar Phoenix,Photo Rescure, Magic ISO, DiskAid, Wondershare, Phone Disk and Backup Extractor in a poor attempt at recovering the photos myself. Backup Extractor shows that I have no pics in any of the three backups that are saved and Wondershare doesn't recognise my Iphone as a drive.... sooo yeah.

Really hoping there are techies out here who can be of assistance.

[deidrett]

Nobody?!

[sundae99]

IIRC, before any action by iTunes, it makes a backup.
If you have one, Photo Rescue will recover your photos.

HTH.

[deidrett]

IIRC, before any action by iTunes, it makes a backup.
If you have one, Photo Rescue will recover your photos.

HTH.

The backup was apparently overwritten because Phone Disk shows that there are no pictures in any of my backups.
I read somewhere that the files are located on the Phone's drive (almost like a recycle bin) but are not as easily accessible and perhaps not even in the typical image format. As a result, there may be overwritten if the phone continues to be used. I stopped using mine when i realised the photos were removed. The site posted above is supposedly "THE" way to recover it... I just don't know how to do it on a Windows machine.

[sundae99]

Sorry can't help i'm on Mac.


Edit: If you have not synced your iphone to itunes, and deleted a photo, then there is no way to retrieve it. AFAIK there's no recycle bin on iPhone.

[deidrett]

Sorry can't help i'm on Mac.


Edit: If you have not synced your iphone to itunes, and deleted a photo, then there is no way to retrieve it. AFAIK there's no recycle bin on iPhone.

I guess you didn't look at the site I posted. I'm getting them back btw!

[sundae99]

I guess you didn't look at the site I posted. I'm getting them back btw!

You are right, didn't, but I'm looking at it now.

Create a disk image of iPhone and recovering from there is the way.
Thank you for posting, I am glad you did it.

[deidrett]

=)

[hvertuse]

It's not so much like a trash folder, the OS just erases it's reference to the file's location. It doesn't know that anything exists in the photo's spot anymore, so it's considered free space and can be overwritten. It will continue to exist until something eventually overwrites that spot. Using recovery software, you can do low-level scans to find those files that are "gone" but not overwritten. Unfortunately, as the linked thread shows, the user data is now encrypted, so the scanning software can't find anything the way it could on iOS versions earlier than 4. I'm unaware of any free tool that exists to decrypt the data and the only commercial option is not available to the general public(only police/gov/forensic teams). I'd love to be wrong, though.

As far as simplifying the instructions, that's a tough one. For an SSH server for Windows, I'd suggest MobaSSH. Easier to setup than Cygwin. Getting the newest version of MobileTerminal for your iPhone is just a little bit of a pain in the *** and I don't know if it comes with everything you need. I can't remember if it even comes with SSH out of the box.

[deidrett]

Thank you for your responses guys. I actually already downloaded WinSCP to SSH into my phone. I got Mobileterminal working without too much trouble and the devices "see" each other... However, for some reason, when I enter the "su" command and my password... and then attempt to enter the dumping code, it seems as though the code is too long and it begins to overwrites the characters prior to it.

The one time, it actually worked, I was asked to enter a password. I read on the same posted thread that the computer's user password was to be entered there. I created a pw for the Administrator user, but like other forum posters, I too get a Permission Denied error. Perhaps I should have restarted... I'll try that and see if it helps. I downloaded a dd.exe file and put it in the WINSCP folder... but I'm not sure if it actually works

On another note, I copied the Iphone folders I saw using WINSCP to my desktop... it's not an image file but can't this substitute as a "dump"? Can I use Nero to convert it to an image and then scan it with PhotoRec?

Hvertuse, I'm hoping you're wrong too, and somehow I'll still be able to recover them..