Lost Pictures and a iPhone Jailbreak

This weekend I went to the Apple store with a friend of mine. She had a computer that when some other Apple Certified care tried to fix it really messed up the enclosure. Since I was there I asked about my iPhone, it has been draining the battery a ton, but only while I travel, and calls didn't work while in crowds. They tell me the crowd part is AT&T's fault, which I mostly understand, but still. The said there was nothing they could do about the battery. I was sad, but I at least wanted my head phones replaced, because jiggling the end would make one side not work. Turns out that was a short in the phone, so they were able to get me a brand new looking, probably refurbished iPhone 3gs. Note: IF YOU EVER BUY AN APPLE PRODUCT GET APPLE CARE FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN, it is worth it, their customer service is great.

Since I had driven an hour to Salt Lake City to get the the Apple store my friend and I decided to go to the top of the conference center to see the park on top, and wander a bit around temple square. I took 30 great pictures. I like tulips a lot, and Temple Square was covered in them.

When I got home, I plugged my phone in and "Restored" it back to what I had on the other phone that morning, which is a pretty cool feature, it brought back all my texts. notes, info in apps, and even pictures. S

ad thing is it completely deleted the pictures I had taken that day. Really annoying, I should have copied them first, but I was in a hurry and didn't think.

I really liked a few of those pictures so I did what any knowledgeable computer person would do, and tried to find a way to restore the pictures. Most devices this would be rea

lly easy, just download a program that does photo restoration, and it will look though your hard drive for deleted files and find what it can, as long as it hasn't been covered with something new. Computes don't actually delete files, they just forget they have them, and replace the space with something else eventually. Sadly this is an iPhone, so Apple wouldn't let me see anything. There was no way to check the drive, and therefore no way to get back the pictures.

I really liked those pictures. This gave me the motivation to try and mount my iPhone to be able to search the drive. I never did figure that out. Instead I found other pages that told me how to completely copy the entire drive over ssh. I have never really used ssh for anything, but I really wanted those pictures so I learned how. On my windows computer I had an ssh client, but still needed a ssh server so I found it. The program I wanted to copy with wasn't installed in the command prompt, so I downloaded it and even added it to the windows path. Real complicated stuff. The program I added didn't work through the ssh, so I tried again in ubuntu linux. It was able to work.

The process to get ssh on the iPhone started with a Jailbreak. That just means using a hack that does non-apple prog

ramming. I was a bit afraid of breaking my iPhone, I tried twice unsuccessfully luckily not bricking it and the third time the Jailbreak took. From that point I installed ssh and got it all working and copying. The copying took about 8 hours, but I was able to do it, after one unsuccessful attempt of about 3 hours. 14GBs is a lot to copy. It is a good thing it lies about being 16GBS. After I had the memory saved, I got my iPhone fully restored with

apps and all and all my music back on. I hadn't put everything because I didn't want the pictures coverd. Luckily it didn't auto copy all the music back.

Now I still have to make a virtual drive on my PC to be able to scan for those deleted files, but that means clearing 20 GBs, which I haven't had time to do. I might do it tonight.

Since I was already Jailbroken I decided to see the perks. I am not going back. There are two things that make it more than worth it. Two simple programs: Springboard and PlayAwake. Springboard lets me hide the icons Apple stocks that I never wanted and also gives me easy access to simple controls I wanted of turning on and off wifi and bluetooth, and changing brightness. Apple makes you go through like 20 options to do that. PlayAwake lets me choose a song from my music library and then use it for an alarm. That has been my biggest peeve about my iphone. I am not going back now. I even paid $2 to get the office PlayAwake because I support it, even though it is super easy to get a cracked version. If only apple would give me those shortcuts and the ability to choose my songs, I would never Jailbreak, but those two simple options make me never want to go back to stock.

Springboard PlayAwake