The Unauthorized Guide to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Repair (2013)

Chapter 18. Recovering Data from Your Broken iDevice

A wise teacher once told me, “Tim, with iDevices there are many shades of ‘dead.’” What this person meant is that a customer’s complaint of “My iPhone is dead” conveys practically no useful information to the technician.

Some common questions in response to the “My iDevice is dead” statement include the following:

Does your iDevice not turn on at all, or does it turn on but doesn’t do anything?

When did you last charge the iDevice?

Did any liquid get on or inside the iDevice?

How long has the device not worked?

What changed in the iDevice’s environment between when it last worked and when it didn’t?

The list of open-ended diagnostic questions goes on and on. In my experience, most customers express concern that they won’t be able to get to their data anymore now that the iDevice is apparently bricked.

This chapter starts with a detailed consideration of how iDevice users can minimize their risk of data loss in the event of iDevice failure.

Next it describes some scenarios that embrace various forms of iDevice “deadness” and provides you with some strategies for gaining access to iDevice data. For instance, I show you how to move the disk drive from one iDevice to another and mount the disk in the second device for the purposes of data retrieval.

Finally, this chapter shows you how easy it is to extract data from iTunes backups. This conversation involves information security and data encryption and dovetails nicely with what’s covered in Chapter 19, “Before You Sell, Donate, or Recycle Your iDevice.”

Protecting Your Data by Using Apple Services

In a best-case scenario, you (or your customer) avail yourselves of Apple’s services to ensure that your data remains available to you on all of your iDevices. After all, redundancy (that is, keeping data stored in several locations at once) is a cornerstone of fault tolerance in the IT industry.

Our two best friends in this regard are iCloud and iTunes Match.

iCloud

As you probably know, iCloud is Apple’s cloud-based storage service. The service began life as .Mac before becoming MobileMe. “Cloud-based storage” means that the following iDevice user data is stored on Apple’s servers:

Purchased music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books

Photos and videos in the Camera Roll

Device settings (for example, Phone Favorites, Wallpaper, and Mail, Contacts, Calendar accounts)

Home screen and app organization

App data (not the apps themselves; only data stored within the apps)

Messages (iMessage, SMS, and MMS)

Ringtones

Visual Voicemails

In other words, all the contents of an iTunes-based iDevice backup are included in iCloud backups.

What’s ingenious about this service is that you can retrieve the cloud-based resources on any Mac computer or iDevice that shares the same Apple ID. Isn’t that great?

You already know how convenient iCloud backups are. Please do everything you can to encourage your clients to use their free iCloud accounts and purchase additional storage if necessary to back up all of their data.

iTunes Match

iTunes Match is a subscription service in which you store your iTunes music library in the cloud on Apple’s servers. You can then pull down that content to all of your Macs and iDevices. If you listen to music or audiobooks much, like I do, then this service more than pays for itself.

You also have the security of knowing that a dead iDevice isn’t going to interrupt your music and media enjoyment one little bit. You can repair or replace the device, enable iTunes Match in iOS, and BOOM! You have your library back.

Retrieving User Data from a “Dead” iDevice

Remember the watchwords with which I opened up this chapter: “Dead” is a relative term with iDevices. If you have a waterlogged iDevice and if you’ve been studying this book, you now know how to address that situation. (Refer to Chapter 14, “Addressing Water Damage,” for a refresher.)

If you have an iDevice that won’t power on then you now know how to disassemble the unit. Remember that the permanent, solid-state storage is contained in a chip on the logic board. You can therefore take the logic board out of the failed iDevice and install it into the chassis of a known-good device.

Of course, the aforementioned procedure won’t work if you have a damaged logic board; in that case, I hope that you have a recent backup to fall back on.

When you are able to power on the iDevice, you need to connect it to iTunes, take a backup, and then use a third-party utility to drill into the iTunes backup archive and review its contents. I cover that procedure later in this chapter.

Retrieving User Data from a Live iDevice

You may find yourself in a situation where you need to retrieve media from a physically intact iDevice, but for whatever reason you can’t get to the PC or Mac with which you sync the device. As we see in a moment, Apple enables you to sync your iDevice with one, and only one, instance of iTunes. What are we to do?

Music

I once supported iOS devices at a local high school in Nashville. Without question, the biggest concern the kids had when they brought their broken iPods to me was, “Mr. Warner, can you please get my music back?”

This was before iCloud or iTunes Match, so there was the very real possibility that the 40 hours the student spent ripping his or her CDs into the iTunes library might actually go up the flue.

Did you ever wonder why iTunes let you sync your iDevice’s music library with only one computer at a time? How many of you have seen the iTunes message shown in Figure 18.1 when you tried to pull music from an iPod by syncing it with another computer?

FIGURE 18.1 iTunes lets you sync an iDevice with only one computer.

The answer to this question consists of four letters: RIAA. When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, they were (and are) subject to media usage restrictions from the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA) and other music industry-affiliated groups.

From the RIAA’s perspective, the one device/one computer synchronization limit made sense. After all, what would stop somebody from sharing their iTunes library with their friends by dumping the music on multiple host computers?

The typical iDevice customer/music enthusiast can’t imagine the licensing details that go on behind the scenes to support technologies like iTunes Wi-Fi home sharing (find out more at http://is.gd/HUpubd) or iTunes Match. I have some very good friends who work for Broadcast Music International (BMI) here in Nashville, so I have some privileged insight into the situation.

The good news is that third-party development has stepped in to fill the void (although Apple has filled itself with iTunes Match, frankly) by providing us with software to retrieve our media libraries from our iDevices.

Here is a list of some of the most popular iDevice music library retrieval products:

AnyTrans (shown in Figure 18.2; Windows only; http://is.gd/7HnJzT)

FIGURE 18.2 AnyTrans gives you full control over your iDevice music library.

iRip (Mac and Windows; http://is.gd/y34VVM)

Senuti (Mac only; http://is.gd/pYFE6S)

In closing, I want to let you know that you can always mount the iDevice as a disk in Windows or Mac and access the music library folders directly. This procedure might work as a last-ditch effort when you are pressed for time.

However, pulling music “in the raw” like this means that you lose all of the meaningful metadata surrounding your music library, especially objects like playlists, ratings, and listen counts. That’s the chief advantage (besides ease of use, naturally) that third-party solutions offer us.

Photos

As long as your iDevice doesn’t have passcode protection enabled, or you know the passcode, you can mount the iDevice as a camera in Windows and Mac and import your Camera Roll pictures, as shown in Figure 18.3. That’s all well and good if all you need are the photos you snapped by using your iDevice. However, what if you need ALL of the photos that you previously synced to a computer?

FIGURE 18.3 You can import Camera Roll pictures to your computer without iTunes.