PhotoRec Review | Best Free iPhone Data Recovery Software Review

PhotoRec is a multi-platform open-source file recovery software for recovering lost pictures, video, documents, archives and more from hard disks, CD-ROMs, digital camera memory, USB memory drives, etc.

Pros

1. It’s a completely free iPhone deleted data recovery software, as it’s open source and distributed under GNU General Public License (GPLV v2+).
2. It’s a multi-platform iPhone data recovery app, DOS/Windows 9x, Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP, Windows Server 2016/2012/2008/2003, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X are on its support list. If necessary, it can also be compiled on almost every Unix system.
3. PhotoRec can recover deleted files from almost all the popular file system – HFS+, FAT, NTFS, exFAT, ext2/ext3/ext4 – even if it’s severely damaged.
4. More than 480 file extensions (about 300 file families) are recoverable by the iPhone file recovery software. ZIP, Office, PDF, HTML, JPEG and various graphics file formats are included.

Cons

1. The iPhone that you need to recover deleted files from should be Jailbroken. As we all know, Jailbreaking voids Apple’s warranty on the device.
2. Several apps should be installed on your iPhone and computer before the iPhone recovery.
3. 3 apps need to be installed on the iPhone for the file recovery, which may take up the storage space that used to store the lost files and overwrite the lost data, leading the data almost impossible to recover.
4. PhotoRec uses command-line user interface, which may be difficult for novices.
5. The iPhone data recovery procedure is a little complicated, especially for novices.
6. Data is encrypted by default on iPhone, so you need to decrypt the data first: https://code.google.com/archive/p/iphone-dataprotection/

Things you need:

1. The iPhone that you want to get back deleted files from. You should jailbreak the iPhone before the recovery.
2. BSD Subsystem, OpenSSH and Terminal (or MobileTerminal) installed on your iPhone.
3. An SSH server and the ‘DD’ utility installed on your Linux computer and an SSH server installed on your Mac OS X.
4. PhotoRec installed on your computer.

Steps:

1. Keep the screen of the iPhone always on by opening Settings App, go to Display & Brightness and select Never from the options of Auto-Lock.
2. Connect the iPhone to the power.
3. Launch the Terminal on your iPhone.
4. Use “su” to become root.
5. Run dd if=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4096 | ssh -C username@computer_IP ‘dd of=iphone.img’.
   • Replace username by the user account on your computer and computer_IP by the IP address of your computer.
   • This command is case sensitive, don’t get it wrong.
   • Don’t confuse dd if= with dd of=, otherwise you may overwrite your iPhone memory.
   • It may take a few hours, so be patient. There will be no progress bar.
6. Once the copy is finished, run photorec iphone.img.
7. Select the source partition that holds the lost files from the listed options.
8. Pick the file types that you want to recover from the iPhone image.
9. Highlight the file system type [Other] FAT/NTFS/HFS+/ReiserFS/…
10. Choose the option [Free] to make the PhotoRec search files from unallocated space only for recovering only deleted files from iPhone.
11. Specify the directory where the recovered files should be stored.
12. The iPhone recovery is in progress and the number of recovered files is updated in real time.
13. When the recovery is finished, you’ll see a summary of the found files by file types.