My iPhone crashed during a recent OS upgrade. I have managed to restore all my apps but have lost all of the data associated with these apps. iTunes seems to keep only one backup and presumably “overwrites” previous ones. Is there any way of recovering older backups which will contain my missing personal data?

– McPhedran

8 Responses to “How to retrieve old iPhone backups”

  1. Have you been using Time Machine to back up? If so, then it will have older copies of the iPhone backup file.
    These are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
    It will be tricky to identify the backup and use TM to revert to an older copy. But it can theoretically work.

    • McPhedran says:

      Sadly not though I will do in future. I’ve found a backup on my previous computer which will have most of my lost data. I’m now just trying to work out how to restore from that computer and still be able to do all future backups etc on my current computer!

  2. Manly says:

    After upgrade my iphone into 4.0.1 I had lost all of the data associated. Is there any way of recovering older backups which will contain my missing personal data?
    Thank you

  3. Jack says:

    Hi Gary,

    I want to get my current iphone backup to my new mac, I’m looking into my old mac’s directory and I can’t seems to find ((MobileSync)) within the Application Support folder, therefore I can’t find my backup datas, I’m runing Mac OSX 10.6.4 on my old macbook pro (mid 2008 model). Could you help me out please. Thank you.

    • Are you looking in the right place? It should be in the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder. The ~ means it is in your home directory, not the Library folder at the top level.
      If it isn’t there, I’m not sure there is anything you can do.

  4. Dan says:

    My wife purchased an iphone4 and gave me her 3. At the store, they transferred everything from the 3 to the 4 and then my old AT@T to the iphone3. when she got home , she did a back up. However, when she plugged the 4 into the computer, it automatically udated the 4 with all the info that is now on the 3, which is my data, not hers. Is there a way to retrive her old data back onto the 4?

    • You’ll need to work at it. The first thing I would do is to look to see if the phone has MobileMe set to your account. But if that is not the case, you will have to work at separating the data — there are a lot of ways this could have happened, but I have never run into it, so I can’t give you step-by-step or anything.

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