It can happen to anyone. You’re using your iPhone and suddenly realize you just deleted something important. Or maybe you can’t remember your unlock PIN but really need that one note for work. Either way, iMyFone D-Back data recovery utility has you covered. Let’s have a look…
You have a solid backup strategy for your iPhone, right? I mean, if you dropped it in the sink or spilled that fancy cappuccino on it, you’d just laugh at it starting to spark and going dead. Or maybe you like to live with a different type of excitement and enjoy challenging your children to create a PIN that you can’t guess. On your iPhone.
Of course, there are also far more common reasons that can cause you to require a recovery utility for lost photos, videos, or other files, along with ways you can simply forget your PIN. I had that happen to me about a year ago, I’d been busy changing all my security codes on all my devices and just plain drew a blank when I went to unlock my phone the next morning. Took me a while to recover access, feeling rather daft the entire time.
Fortunately if you do need to recover data, files, photos or similar, iMyFone D-Back is a powerful and easy to use tool that offers quite a range of capabilities. Let’s have a look, starting by trying to access my iPhone X without unlocking it first. So the phone’s plugged into my MacBook via USB-C. Normally I’d be unable to proceed at all, right? iTunes would certainly say “unlock phone to proceed”.
Launching iMyFone D-Back shows all the major options:
Along the left are: Smart Recovery, Recover from iOS Device, Recover from iTunes Backup, Recover from iCloud Backup and Fix iOS System. I’ll just click Start to proceed to the next step…
Remember, the phone’s still locked, though plugged in. I’m going to choose “iPhone locked by a forgotten passcode & others” to proceed. And I’m skeptical that it’ll be able to sidestep the phone security and access the data…
But let’s find out by clicking on “Start”:
A minute or so of scanning and, to my surprise, everything’s seemingly accessible:
I’m going to have a look at the photos on the iPhone. Easily done by checking the box adjacent to the “Photo” icon in the third row of icons. Now the program begins to analyze the device:
iMyFone D-Back says “will take some time” but my experience was that it was a few minutes, no longer. And then a window popped up with all the photos found on the iPhone:
Now the display of the photos is a bit distorted as they’re forced into a square orientation, but to my surprise, it certainly is showing every image that’s on my iPhone. By default I can copy everything, but that’s going to be a lot of photos – over 3000 – so instead I’ll uncheck the box adjacent to the “Photo (3075)” on the top right to unselect all, then pick a specific photo instead.
The photo I want to recover from the locked iPhone X is the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign. Once checked, a click on “Recover” and…
The most important line in this dialog box is “Note: Media files will be recovered in their original format”. Good, so no worries, and nothing to choose. Just make sure you know where the restored files are going to be saved then click “Recover”.
Really quite easily done and very beneficial. In fact, here it is in the Finder:
But what about if I had accidentally deleted files from my own phone? To test that out, I’ll keep my iPhone X plugged in, unlock it this time, and choose “Lost or deleted data by accident” from the main screen. This time I’ll choose “Messages” and dig around to see what photos the program can find.
After status updates similar to what I showed earlier, here’s what the program displays:
You can see all the text messages sent and received – 189 conversations – and a separate area for Message Attachments. A lot of message attachments. So that’s what I’ll check out:
Same basic routine from here: recover everything or check the box adjacent to “Message Attachment” to unselect, then pick the individual image or images – or videos! – you want to recover. Easy as can be.
Overall, iMyFone D-Back is a darn helpful utility to have available, and when you have to recover something critical it’s going to be a life saver.
iMyFone D-Back iPhone Data Recovery, for Mac or Windows. Prices start at $49.99 for a license.
Disclosure: iMyFone supplied me with a software license in return for this review.