Please help! My iPhone 3G crashed last Saturday. I had to download iTunes on a work desktop to get it working again because my home computer took a dump on me several months ago. The last time I synced was almost a year ago. Is there any possible way to retrieve my lost contacts, bookmarks, photos, notes etc. directly from my iPhone without using iTunes backup? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Need Help Recovering Lost Data...
- Thread starter fungwasher
- Start date
Welcome to the forum! I am sorry to hear that this has happened to you. I will definitely try my best to help you out. Have you tried to plug your iPhone into your desktop and seeing if there is an available backup to restore from? If not, you should check your computer. If you go to Files-Apple iTunes, that is where backups are saved.
I am sad to say that if this does not help, you may have to manually put back the information. Do you have the photos saved elsewhere that you can import into your iPhone?
EDIT: I apologize, I did not see the part where your home computer no longer works. I hope you can get everything back by manually entering it. Also, others may have some ideas. But, as of right now, I think starting to manually enter contacts and find your photos is your best bet for now.
I am sad to say that if this does not help, you may have to manually put back the information. Do you have the photos saved elsewhere that you can import into your iPhone?
EDIT: I apologize, I did not see the part where your home computer no longer works. I hope you can get everything back by manually entering it. Also, others may have some ideas. But, as of right now, I think starting to manually enter contacts and find your photos is your best bet for now.
Sorry to hear about your disaster. Like everyone here has said, unless you have a backup you can restore from, there's not much hope in retrieving your data. With that said, even if your home computer crashed, you may be able to still recover the backup of your phone from the hard drive by putting it in another computer as a secondary drive and browsing to the data files, then copy them onto a flash drive and transferring them to your work computer setting up the file structure so that you can do a restore in iTunes by then browsing to that recovered file. Just a quick guess if you still have the hard drive.
Agreed. If your data is that valuable, you should to gain access your computers hard drive in another computer. Look for the iPhone backup there.
As an FYI in the future if your computer is down, back up to iCloud. It's a free 5GB, and it's easy to back up to. Hope you can get that backup!
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I think I'm probably SOL. 
I was able to look in my download history through iTunes on the pc at work and restore all of my apps. I'll see if I can retrieve any backups that may still be on my home pc. But like I said, I haven't synced on it in almost a year because it's basically an oversized paper weight at this point. I'll grab what pics I can from my photobucket account & start re-entering contacts I guess. FML
I was able to look in my download history through iTunes on the pc at work and restore all of my apps. I'll see if I can retrieve any backups that may still be on my home pc. But like I said, I haven't synced on it in almost a year because it's basically an oversized paper weight at this point. I'll grab what pics I can from my photobucket account & start re-entering contacts I guess. FML