iPhone data recovery

March 26, 2008 1:32 PM

Recovering iPhone data to OS X 10.5.2.

My significant other's MacBook hard drive died. Thanks to fabulous assistance from members of MeFi, I was able to put a new hard drive in without too much trouble. Now I'm wondering what the safest / easiest way is to recover iTunes music. The iPhone is still running 1.1.2.

Basically, I'd like to get all the music files and playlists off the iPhone and onto the new OS/hard drive/iTunes in the MacBook. I know there's third-party software out there which claims to do this. Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations? I'm worried if we plug the iPhone into the Mac, iTunes will automatically resynch and wipe out the files on the iPhone before we have a chance to recover the songs.

We've already re-entered all Address Book info, Notes, etc., so we're only interested in recovering those music files. I'm most thankful in advance for your help.

posted by Lucy2Times to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Looks like Tune Aid will do what you want, but I've never used it.

However, you don't need to worry about iTunes automatically erasing your phone as soon as you plug it in. It will ask you before it syncs with a different computer, which in this case your SO's Macbook effectively is, given that you replaced the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. As long as you're careful where you click when you plug it in, you should be fine.
posted by dyslexictraveler at 2:15 PM on March 26, 2008

Is your iPhone jailbroken with SSH installed? If so it should be a simple processes to transfer everything via FTP from the phone to the computer over WiFi.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:50 PM on March 26, 2008

I can vouch for Podworks. It's the only one I know of that works with the iPhone/Touch. It also handles getting metadata and playlists back onto your computer as well. Only $8!

http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks/
posted by GS1977 at 3:08 PM on March 26, 2008

blue_beetle -- the iPhone in question is 100% Apple-legit, but it's only running 1.1.2. There's no FTP client on it. Thanks.
posted by Lucy2Times at 3:17 PM on March 26, 2008

PodWorks seems to do the trick with iPods, but only MegaPhone is capable of getting around the problem of the iPhone not having a disk mode function. MegaPhone will save your music data, but it wasn't able to get my playlists. Hope this helps anyone else in the same boat.
posted by Lucy2Times at 6:54 AM on April 1, 2008