Ever wish you could recover lost photos, voice mail or text messages from your iPhone? Or just save those hilarious texts from grandma? FonePaw has you covered with its splendid, easy to use and surprisingly powerful iPhone Data Recovery program for Mac and PC…
Every few weeks someone asks me if there’s a way to archive text messages from their iPhone and until now my answer has been either to make sure you’re hooked up with iCloud so that they also show up on your Mac (if you have a Mac) or that they’re probably out of luck. Then there are the photos that you deleted a few weeks ago and now realize you want to recover, or that voice mail message you really need to hear just one more time. Lots of reasons you might want to be able to dig through your iPhone, or iPhone backup, whether on your computer or stored in iCloud, for that matter.
There are a few open source programs that offer some of this capability, but as they’re written by hackers with unknown motivations, I’m always a bit leery about recommending people use unknown software that is then privvy to the often remarkably personal data from their smartphones. Ya just don’t know where the stored credit card transactions, the intimate texts between you and a significant other and even the phone book and all its numbers, birthdays and email addresses might end up.
Still, the need to be able to crack open the iPhone and get to the data inside remains.
Enter the very impressive iPhone Data Recovery application for Mac and Windows PC systems from FonePaw.
For this evaluation, I installed it on a laptop running Microsoft Windows 8.1. Quick to download, it’s easy to get started once launched:
I plugged in my Apple iPhone 6 and…
Modern versions of iOS have some security to stop surreptitious iPhone scanners that are masquerading as “free charging ports”, so the program prompts you to “trust” the computer. That looks like this on the computer:
And like this on the iPhone itself:
I do trust this computer and software program, so a tap on “Trust” is all that’s needed. But life’s not always that easy, because behind the scenes there are some potential conflicts that can appear and for me, well, I appear to hit them all.
First I had some issues with *cough* available disk space:
I can’t imagine what’s taking up so much space! 🙂
I fixed that, then it was time for a behind-the-scenes death match between iPhone Data Recovery and iTunes itself:
This turns out to be a bit tricky to solve because the background synchronization task from iTunes is a separate app than iTunes itself. After trying a couple of different solution paths, I figured out that if I went into iTunes and simply clicked the “eject” button for the device, it then freed up my iPhone 6 so that FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery could then attach to it.
Once that was solved, the program began scanning the 64GB iPhone:
This step can take a while, so it’s probably a good time to grab a cup of coffee or take a bio-break, as appropriate.
Finally, though, it finished scanning and the results were quite impressive, albeit a bit tricky to read at first:
In the above, it’s still scanning the iPhone but can at least begin to show results. And quite the results they are!
On the left side you can hopefully see that it found 776 photos in the Camera Roll, 592 in the Photo Stream, 120 in the Photo Library, 169 text messages and a startling 555 message attachments (I can only conclude people send me a lot of photos via text message!), 1023 contacts, 1462 entries in my call history (sorry Homeland Security, I don’t really want to share that data with you 🙂 ), and 119 voicemail messages.
That data’s interesting by itself, but where this gets interesting is once it’s done scanning, because then you can explore and examine all of this data with the click of a button.
For example, I’ll click on those Message Attachments to have a peek:
Well, look at all those photos! These are pictures that I’ve either sent or received across the many, many people I communicate with via sms text message. This feature by itself is terrific in my opinion, but this program is FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery, so it’s easy to grab and save a copy of any of these images, or even a bunch at once.
I’ll choose a single image by clicking on its checkbox then clicking “Recover” on the lower right…
That output folder looks good, so I’ll click on “Recover” and Windows then promptly shows me what’s happened:
There it is, a photo of my long-lost Motorola Sol Republic Deck speaker in yellow and black. Now if the program could just find the darn speaker itself, but that’s another story. 🙂
Jumping into the “Messages” category is really interesting too, because it turns out that there are a lot of discussions that I thought I’d deleted from my iPhone but are still in the raw data archives:
As you can see on the right pane, it shows the back and forth messages in a very iPhone-esque way too, in this case a discussion between my friend Kevin and I from a while back. Not all the data is tagged properly, however: those of you with eagle eyes will notice that the date of the last message is 11/26/2023. Pretty sure my iPhone can’t travel in time, so this is just a tiny glitch. The important thing, however, is that FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery has extracted a whole lotta sms text message discussions from the phone.
And here’s something really cool: the program can export and save as many of these discussions as you’d like, they end up as HTML docs in the same folder as all the other recovered data:
Very impressive indeed.
But go back to the very first screen shot because FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery doesn’t even need an iPhone to work its magic. Turns out it can also extract and recover data from a local iPhone backup or even one that’s, amazingly enough, stored on iCloud:
I actually found this the most impressive feature because generally there’s a sense that those iCloud backups are inaccessible to us users, just more mysterious data in “the cloud”. But no, log in with your Apple ID credentials and:
I have to say I was very favorably surprised by the features, capabilities and usability of FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery. In fact, if you have an iPhone of any sort, it’s just a matter of time before you want to save some photos you received, archive a voicemail message, backup your address book or simply explore what’s saved and what’s in those backup archive files in the cloud, and I know of no better solution, Mac or PC, than FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery.
FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery app, $69.95 (PC) or $79.95 (Mac) for lifetime license. And well worth it.
Download for Windows PC || Download for Mac.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review, but as with all our reviews, this means the vendor is helping us keep the lights on in the office, it doesn’t influence our candid and honest opinion of the product or service.
how did you clean up the disk space issue?
my phone has about 50gb spare and my mac about 100gb spare.
but i’m getting the same message as you…
thanks
NIce program! Easy to use but professional.