A follow up to my first post: iPhone 3GS data recovery.
I’ve been through a lot of recovery software during the past week, including Stellar Phoenix, Disk Warrior or VirtualLab.
All of those are serious apps, but you have to pay big bucks, even if you never know exactly what you will be able to recover.
I’ve found one small app called PhotoRec and decided to give it a try. It’s a small terminal-based app. It manages all common file types, has no graphical UI whatsoever, but it just gets the job done.
- Get your iPhone 3Gs disk image as described in this post
- Double click on the disk image “dump.img”, it’ll mount on your desktop
- Download Photorec (install Rosetta if you are on OS 10.6)
- Launch Photorec, choose the mounted image, and you’re done!
Here is a screenshot from Photorec running:
Among all the files I recovered, I realized there were many screenshots the iPhone takes to ease transitions between screens.
That’s a funny one: I was still using the phone to look for help while my lost data was still in it.
PhotoRec will do the job if you accidentaly remove photos from your camera roll. My case was a little more complicated. I had to to a full restore, my iPhone was bricked.
Doing such a thing quickly ruins any easy option to recover the files, as the iPhone uses Random-access memory. It’s not like a traditional disk where you could always recover the data if it had not been overwritten.
This method could be helpful as well for spy wannabes. Such automated screenshots also reveal internet history, call logs, sms messages and more.
Happy recovery!
