Thanks Guys. I had no back-up for it Icloud or otherwise.
Too bad.
Well......... I do have a
really long shot method, but I feel that it's still the most likely way to find your lost files, if anything is going to work at all. It's going to be a slog, and there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll find anything useful... but
maybe. Your only hope is that the secret keeper app didn't actually encrypt anything, and that it did a really poor job of cleaning up after itself -- and you're going to have to dig through the raw contents of the phone (likely
thousands of files) in order to find out.
Start by checking the available free storage on your computer, to see that it has enough space to store the entire contents of your iPhone.
Do not delete things from the phone in an attempt to make this possible. If you make additional changes on the iPhone itself, those changes may increase the odds that iOS cleanup routines end up being automatically triggered, which might cause any remnants of your missing files to go "Poof." So if you don't already have enough free space on your computer, you're going to have to find some other way to make more space available.
Next, connect the iPhone to the computer with a USB cable and make a full backup of the iPhone to your computer via either iTunes or the Finder, depending upon which OS you have installed -- and ensure that you do
not select to encrypt that backup. (It's usually a preferred practice to encrypt backups, for
a lot of good reasons... but for this to work, you have to do it unencrypted.)
After you've completed the backup, you'll need to locate those backup files on your computer's drive. Apple has a
support article which tells you where to look. Absolutely everything that was on your iPhone at the time it was backed up is
somewhere in that insane collection of folders... but they're named in such a way that only a computer could love: no file extensions and no human readable text in the names.
If you're a Mac user, you may want to download
GraphicConverter; it's a shareware tool with a lot of built-in functionality, but the primary reason you'll want it is to automatically analyze the files within those folders and add the appropriate file extensions to any recognizable image files. It's a very complex program, so I'd suggest you start off by manipulating a
copy of one of the smaller folders in the backup collection, to make sure that you have it configured correctly before running it against the entire collection. Also, when you're ready to do it on the entire collection, make sure you have it set to recurse into child folders. (If you're a Windows user, I'm afraid you'll have to find the Windows equivalent on your own... I've never tried to do this kind of data recovery from Windows.)
Once that's done, it's just a matter of browsing through all of those folders from your desktop in thumbnail view, and hoping that what you lost is still there in some form.
Good luck.
Oh... and also, once you're done with all of this, I suggest that you make a new (encrypted) backup and maintain that backup on your computer going forward. Getting it all setup and performing the initial backup may take awhile, particularly if your iPhone has a lot of data on it -- but periodically updating that backup with the latest changes typically takes very little time in comparison. Anyway, just a thought.
