Hi everyone,
I have a problem with my wife's iphone (or rather, she has...). I hope that someone can help me. This is what happened(it is an iphone 4 16GB):
Everything started when the camera stopped working. The shutter won't open. We called tech support and they suggested hard restart and then updating the software. She never updated it (it was 4.1.1). I proceeded to update the OS. The phone was almost full with pictures and videos, almost no space left, probably several hundred megs. I decided to copy all the pics on the comp (a win7 laptop) just in case, so I did. I wanted to do that and then delete them from the phone so the update is quicker but she insisted on keeping them on the phone. So I started the update with everything on the phone. iTunes downloaded the latest OS, backed up the phone and then came with some error (-5000). Then I tried again. Same thing, the backup went through and (-5000)... Here is the place to say that I had very limited space on the laptop so I monitored the creation of the backup file very carefully. I also deleted some older backups of my iphone. Back to the (-5000) error. I researched a bit on the internet, and following the advice that I found there, turned off AVG (anti-virus software) and Windows Firewall. The third attempt was successful. The backup and the OS update went through. The problem with the camera shutter was however still there. We decided to bring the phone to the Genius Bar in the morning. In the morning I went to work and she went to the Genius Bar. They wanted to wipe the phone clean, or whatever the lingo was, and asked her whether she made a backup. She answered yes, and they restored the phone to factory settings. The camera was working. They told her to go home and restore the backup. To our biggest surprise, the backup file wasn't there and now this is the real problem. I saw it with my eyes the night before and now it wasn't there. That was a huge blow to her because much stuff, personal and work-related, some irreplaceable, was in that backup.
I was thinking what to do, and came up with running undelete software to see if I can recover the backup somehow. Thankfully, the software succeeded to recover the three backups that I made that night, along with the several old ones that I had deleted, along with a bunch of other stuff. The problem is of course, that the backup originally consisted of 4,000+ files. You can imagine that some of them had gotten overwritten, fully or partially. So there was a number of files that couldn't get recovered at all, some partially. The good thing was, that since there were three backups of the same phone, after the recovery I ended up with one to three copies of each file that was on the phone. If you know the naming scheme, it is afs64udhs0jkfdy7fjhgj97456, or something of the sort
. So I ended up with "filename", "filename_1", and/or "filename_2". My point is that even if one of the copies of each file didn't get recovered, another was, so at the end I must have ended up with pretty much most of the files. manifest.mbdb, manifest.mbdx, info.plist and manifest.plist were also there (I understand that these are somewhat important files). I weeded out all the duplicates and copied the files in the folder where iTunes keeps the backups (C:\Users\NSP\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\). I even succeeded to restore the hexadecimal name of my wife phone's folder.
Hopes somewhat high, I proceeded to attempt a restore. The backup appeared correctly in iTunes (both in edit/preferences/devices and in the main window). Unfortunately, when I clicked on restore from backup, the following message came up - "iTunes couldn't restore the iphone because the iphone refused the request". We went to the Genius Bar again, but there was no real help...
Now what???
We don't really care about a complete restore. What we need is the contacts, texts and notes. Is there any way to figure out which files contain those (obviously the smaller ones, as the bigger ones are pics and videos), and to import them back to the phone. Or at least be able to read them.
Thank you in advance.
Update: After I posted the thread I attempted few things. Namely, I noticed that a file named status.plist was missing from my wife's phone and I copied it from the backup folder of my phone. Then the restore actually started. However, somewhere at the middle it stopped due to "backup file being corrupted or iphone version being incompatible".
I have a problem with my wife's iphone (or rather, she has...). I hope that someone can help me. This is what happened(it is an iphone 4 16GB):
Everything started when the camera stopped working. The shutter won't open. We called tech support and they suggested hard restart and then updating the software. She never updated it (it was 4.1.1). I proceeded to update the OS. The phone was almost full with pictures and videos, almost no space left, probably several hundred megs. I decided to copy all the pics on the comp (a win7 laptop) just in case, so I did. I wanted to do that and then delete them from the phone so the update is quicker but she insisted on keeping them on the phone. So I started the update with everything on the phone. iTunes downloaded the latest OS, backed up the phone and then came with some error (-5000). Then I tried again. Same thing, the backup went through and (-5000)... Here is the place to say that I had very limited space on the laptop so I monitored the creation of the backup file very carefully. I also deleted some older backups of my iphone. Back to the (-5000) error. I researched a bit on the internet, and following the advice that I found there, turned off AVG (anti-virus software) and Windows Firewall. The third attempt was successful. The backup and the OS update went through. The problem with the camera shutter was however still there. We decided to bring the phone to the Genius Bar in the morning. In the morning I went to work and she went to the Genius Bar. They wanted to wipe the phone clean, or whatever the lingo was, and asked her whether she made a backup. She answered yes, and they restored the phone to factory settings. The camera was working. They told her to go home and restore the backup. To our biggest surprise, the backup file wasn't there and now this is the real problem. I saw it with my eyes the night before and now it wasn't there. That was a huge blow to her because much stuff, personal and work-related, some irreplaceable, was in that backup.
I was thinking what to do, and came up with running undelete software to see if I can recover the backup somehow. Thankfully, the software succeeded to recover the three backups that I made that night, along with the several old ones that I had deleted, along with a bunch of other stuff. The problem is of course, that the backup originally consisted of 4,000+ files. You can imagine that some of them had gotten overwritten, fully or partially. So there was a number of files that couldn't get recovered at all, some partially. The good thing was, that since there were three backups of the same phone, after the recovery I ended up with one to three copies of each file that was on the phone. If you know the naming scheme, it is afs64udhs0jkfdy7fjhgj97456, or something of the sort
. So I ended up with "filename", "filename_1", and/or "filename_2". My point is that even if one of the copies of each file didn't get recovered, another was, so at the end I must have ended up with pretty much most of the files. manifest.mbdb, manifest.mbdx, info.plist and manifest.plist were also there (I understand that these are somewhat important files). I weeded out all the duplicates and copied the files in the folder where iTunes keeps the backups (C:\Users\NSP\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\). I even succeeded to restore the hexadecimal name of my wife phone's folder.Hopes somewhat high, I proceeded to attempt a restore. The backup appeared correctly in iTunes (both in edit/preferences/devices and in the main window). Unfortunately, when I clicked on restore from backup, the following message came up - "iTunes couldn't restore the iphone because the iphone refused the request". We went to the Genius Bar again, but there was no real help...
Now what???
We don't really care about a complete restore. What we need is the contacts, texts and notes. Is there any way to figure out which files contain those (obviously the smaller ones, as the bigger ones are pics and videos), and to import them back to the phone. Or at least be able to read them.
Thank you in advance.
Update: After I posted the thread I attempted few things. Namely, I noticed that a file named status.plist was missing from my wife's phone and I copied it from the backup folder of my phone. Then the restore actually started. However, somewhere at the middle it stopped due to "backup file being corrupted or iphone version being incompatible".
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