Helpful settings if you let children play on your iPhone/iPad/iTouch

As one of the resident nerds among my family and friends, one of the typical greetings I get from our children is "Can I play on your phone?" I'm a pushover, so I always say yes.  After a few unintended purchases, intended (but not by me) purchases, and deleted apps, I got wise and changed my settings.  Below is a list of a few settings you might find helpful if you frequently let little ones play on your phone, but not too intrusive for your everyday phone use.

iTunes Sync vs Backup -- How to Ensure You Keep Your Data

One of the great things about working on Decipher TextMessage and Decipher VoiceMail is that I get to help people recover important and personal data (messages from loved ones, photos of grandchildren, and that 11-month conversation with your significant other) on an almost-daily basis.  On the other hand, sometimes I have to heartbreakingly tell people that the data might be lost forever.  If there is one thing that I've learned from all of these interactions, as well as my own iPhone use, it's that to most of us, the iTunes backup functionality is a mystery that we hope will pleasantly surprise us one day.  I'd like to take a minute to remove some of the mystique, and give everyone some much-needed peace-of-mind.

When you plug your iPhone/iTouch/iPad into your computer and run iTunes, there are three forms of communication that you can request happen between your computer and the device: syncing, backing up, and transferring purchases.

What is the iPhone 4's "Group Messaging"?

After you upgraded your iPhone to iOS4, you may have noticed some strange behavior with your group texts. Specifically, you may have sent a group text, had someone reply to you, and then been told by other recipients that they also got the reply.  Or, you may have been the recipient of someone's group text, followed by a reply from one of the recipients.  This behavior is due to a feature released with the iPhone 4 (and in iOS 4) called "Group Messaging".  This post will explain what group messaging is, and how you can disable/enable it if you desire.

How to Redeem an iTunes Promotional Code on your iPhone

If you're reading this, hopefully that means that you have a promotional code that you need to enter into iTunes -- either a code for a free app or a gift card code -- and we're excited for you because we like free stuff! In this blog post, we're going to provide directions for how to enter that code from the App Store app on your iPhone.  You can also redeem your code in iTunes on your computer, but we will leave that to another post.

Viewing Deleted Messages in Your iPhone Backup

Many people who purchase Decipher TextMessage write us asking about the ability to recover deleted messages.  When we say "deleted messages" here, we mean messages that were received and deleted between backups, so that there is no record of the message in a backup.  If you have backed-up your device prior to when the text was deleted, you can use Decipher TextMessage to read the texts in that backup to recover it.  But, the iTunes backup schedule doesn't always nicely coincide with the schedule of our accidents, our fits, or children playing with our phone.  When we get those emails, it tugs at our hearts because we know that you wouldn't be writing if that text wasn't important, and it feels awful having lost it possibly forever.

We're working on adding the ability to read as many deleted messages as we can from the backups, but in the meantime, we wanted to explain why some of your deleted texts may not be totally gone, and how you can go and look for them by hand.

Recover Texts After iOS4 Update

I've read a lot of tweets today from people who upgraded their iPhone to iOS4 today and lost all of their text messages.  For some people, even if the texts somehow didn't transfer to your new iOS4 backup file, you may have other backup files (from OS 3.1.3 or before) with some or all of your texts.  This is a quick writeup to show you how to find your iPhone backups, determine if you might have a useful backup that's recent, and a plug for our tool -- Decipher TextMessage -- that you can use to read the messages out of those backups.

Step 1: Find your iPhone backup files

If you are on a Mac, you can find your backup folders in Home -> Application Support -> MobileSync -> Backup.  You can click on the image below to see how to find the Backup folder in Finder.

In Windows, your backup folders will be in C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup on XP or C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup on Windows 7 or Vista.

Step 2: Determine if you have any useful recent backups

By "useful" backups, we mean a backup folder created prior to your iOS4 update.  You can determine if the backup is from before iOS4 by looking at the folder contents.  If the files inside end in .mdinfo and .mddata as they do in the screenshot above, then the backup is from before iOS4.  If you own multiple iPhoneOS devices (iPad, iPod Touch, other iPhones), keep in mind that these backups may be from these devices.

If you have some pre-iOS4 backups, you should check the date on them to see if they're recent enough to be deemed useful to you (and the date stamp may help you figure out if they're from another device).

On a Mac, right-click (or ctrl-click) on the folder and click on "Get Info" -- you're interested in the folder's "Modified:" date, which will tell you when the backup was made.

On a PC, right-click on the folder and click "Properties" -- you're interested in the folder's "Modified:" date, which will tell you when the backup was made.

If the modified date convinces you that this backup is recent enough to be useful, that's great news!

Step 3: Get those texts off that backup!

If you're on a Mac, I'd recommend grabbing a copy of our Decipher TextMessage which will read the backup folders (both old and new) in your MobileSync -> Backup folder and present them in a nice user interface.

Even if you don't want to read the text messages right now, it's probably worth copying the backup folder to another location (I normally use the MobileSync folder), just so you know you have a copy in case the backup gets wiped-out by iTunes later.

Step 4: Celebrate! or Contact Us :)

Hopefully this tutorial worked out for you -- I'd hate to be suddenly without my massive history of texts.  Please feel free to contact us if you have concerns about the tutorial, or it didn't work for you.  Better yet, please contact us if it did work for you, because we'd love to hear about it!