Hello everyone!

Recently, I forgot my passcode to my iPhone and I had to erase everything on my phone in order to get back in.

I had a lot of photos on the device that were not backed up to the iCloud or any kind of storage.

Is there any chance for me to retrieve those pictures or are they lost forever? I saw that some of my recent contacts were backed up and I can see their information but I can’t figure out if restoring 2 years worth of pictures is possible or not

Thanks in advance! :)

  • Codename_goose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    As a person who used to work with Apple tech, if you didn’t have an iCloud back up of your phone (for potential local storage backup of your lost photos), or a local back up on a pc of your phone of the photos that are not in iCloud, they cannot be recovered. During a restore the Apple device does a secure wipe of the storage on the chips. What you see when you sign back into your iCloud account in terms of contacts is what was already there, and was re-downloaded once you signed back into your account. I’m am truly sorry for the loss of what are possibly very precious memories.

  • Velvy71@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    iPhones are fully encrypted, the encryption key being generated and stored when you first configure the device, then as you add things to the phone they’re stored encrypted.

    When you “wipe” an iPhone, you don’t wipe the memory, you wipe the encryption key which almost instantly makes it near impossible to recover any of the memory contents. So even if you could remove the chips you couldn’t read the content, and there’s no way to recover the encryption key.

    The iOS Security Guide is online if you want more detail.