Broke my phone, need help trying to restore replacement phone from iOS 5 beta o_O

[DarkoNova]

Couple weeks ago (yeah, I've seriously been using it for that long ) I had a drunken mishap and dropped my phone about 5 feet onto concrete. I've actually dropped it a couple times before that, but I guess third time's the charm.





Anyway, luckily I had insurance so I just got my replacement phone last night. The only problem is when I tried to restore it to my broken phone's backup, iTunes says it can't do it because the current firmware is too old. Is there a way to force iTunes to restore to my iOS5 backup? Or at least get all my stuff back? I've literally lost half of my pictures and 25-26 videos that I took since I upgraded to the iOS5 beta...not to mention all my texts...

Help!

[ihappy]

Unfortunately there is no way to downgrade the backup to use on a lower firmware. This has happened to me before. Best bet is to save the backup file and use an iphone backup extractor.

Here's a thread similar to yours and you find that its pretty impossible to get a newer backup to work on an older firmware. Sorry

Restore Newer Backup on Older Firmware?

Edit: You can try this method by editing the plist but no guarantees and I wouldnt recommend it as it can cause problems with a jailbroken device.

[HOW TO] Fix error "Cannot restore iphone.....software too old" after downgrade

[DarkoNova]

Awesome thanks!

I remember using iPhone Backup Extractor back on my 3GS when I had a similar problem and I was able to fix it. For some reason it's not working with my iOS 5 backup.

I did some searching and found iPhone Explorer. I copied my SMS and Media folders to my desktop, is it as simple as dragging them into my new phone? Would that give me all my texts, pictures, and movies back?

Also, is it possible to somehow combine my "old" (iOS5) sms.db with my "new" (iOS4) sms.db? Just so I can have all my texts from when I was on iOS5, and add in all the texts I've gotten in the last day or two.