What exactly does restoring your Iphone do?

[ChandlerXJ]

What exactly does restoring the iPhone do? Does it erase all of your pictures and contacts? I feel like I should just restore my phone every now and again to keep it fresh... what do you think.

[sJv]

Restore basically wipes your iPhone clean, deleting just about everything, including most of it's own software. It then downloads a disk image with it's software onto the phone. I would think, for this reason, that any hacks one did will get overwritten and lost with this restored disk image.

When you sync, most everything comes back. The one thing I noticed that I lost were pictures I took on the camera that I didn't import into iPhoto. Camera pictures don't seem to be automatically sync'ed. You have to manually import them in to iPhoto. I think I had a couple of pictures I forgot to import and they were lost.

-steve

What exactly does restoring the iPhone do? Does it erase all of your pictures and contacts? I feel like I should just restore my phone every now and again to keep it fresh... what do you think.