Lost Your iPhone? How to Recover Photos, Notes, Voice Memos, Contacts, and More from iTunes Backups

By Kelly Wilkerson 

First of all: If you are reading this because you lost your iPhone or iPad, we're so sorry to hear that!

This post will show you how to quickly see what iTunes backups you have of your iOS devices, as well as poke around in the backups a bit to see if there is valuable information for you. We'll be doing this using the free trial of our software, Decipher Backup Browser.

iTunes periodically makes backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch when you sync (not always -- for more on backing up vs syncing, see our previous post here.) We're going to use Decipher Backup Browser to scan your iTunes folder for backups, and show you content from those backups to help you determine if they're useful.

1. Download the free trial of Decipher Backup Browser from our website http://deciphertools.com.
2. Install and run Decipher Backup Browser, and it will show you all of the backup folders it found for your various devices, along with the date and time information for the backup.
3. Click on the interesting backups, and information you're interested in, like camera-roll photos and contacts.

Hopefully you have some of your important data and photos in your backups! From here you have two choices:

• If the backup is recent enough, you may be happy simply restoring your replacement phone from this older backup. This will put those photos, videos, notes, contacts, etc onto your new device.
• If the backup is too old, incompatible, or you don't have a replacement device, you can use Decipher Backup Browser to extract the information you need. You can email the extracted contacts (exported as a vcard file) to your new phone (Android or iPhone or whatever) to import your contacts. You can add the rescued camera-roll photos to your image library. If you have questions about transferring a specific kind of data to your new phone, just drop us a note, and we should be able to help you do the import, even if we need to get creative :)