iTunes is the bane of my existence

July 23, 2014 12:00 AM

Is there hope in restoring photos that have not been backed up or synced onto iCloud?

I was in the process of syncing photos to iCloud, and plugged my iPhone 5S to my iTunes account on my Windows laptop. In the process of doing so, iTunes recommended the update to the latest iOS version. Of course, that crashed my phone, and I got an error message that the upgrade didn't complete. Worse yet, my phone is not usable right now, and iTunes has an error message stating "iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes". I checked older askmes and I found a lot of info in restoring from a backup, but what are my options in this wild wild west state? Help me! I have precious vacation pictures on my phone, would be inconsolable if they're gone forever.

posted by hampanda to Technology (1 answer total)

you generally have to click no specifically to update an iphone without backing up to that machine at least as i remember, if there isn't a current complete icloud backup.

go to preferences>devices in itunes, does a backup show up? if so, just do a restore from recovery mode and restore your backup.

How recent is the last icloud backup you have? how recently were the photos taken? if it's from a few days or a week ago, but your photos are from a month ago you can just restore to an old icloud backup without any issues as well.

This isn't that disastery of a situation assuming one of those two things happened.
posted by emptythought at 1:46 AM on July 23, 2014