Help Recovering Data from iPhone

[AE86Racer2K4]

I have a huge favor to ask the people of this forum.

Last week thieves stole both my macbook pro and my external hard drive which was being used with time machine to backup my hard disk leaving me to pretty much start over again. My parents were kind enough to give me an old Toshiba laptop to hold me over until I could purchase a new one and now I am starting to piece together what I have from flash drives and other places I have data stored.

One place that things are backed up is my iPhone 3GS which has a good chunk of my music library and all my contacts. The problem is when I connect my iPhone, iTunes wants to burn it all and sync it with an empty library. Im also afraid it will erase all my contacts and photos as well. Ive found some tools that will do it for $20 or so. Is there a way for me to get the info off the iPhone without these tools or should I throw down the money?

Thank you everyone for your help!

 

[-aggie-]

Yes, sharepod can get all your music and pics off for free. Once I find one of my posts, I’ll paste the rest of what you can do here, but it involves backing up and syncing. You’ll be fine.

Go into iTunes and sign in with your account and authorize the computer. Make sure iTunes is not setup to auto sync. Plug in your iPhone and right click on the iPhone icon and pick Transfer Purchases. This will get all the apps from the app store into iTunes.

Now right click on the iPhone icon and click Backup. Copy the backup folder under MobileSync (C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup) to a safe place, so you have it in case something goes wrong.

Get sharepod (google it). This will enable you to get your music and pics off the phone. Be aware the pics will not be the same quality as the originals.

Now sync your 3GS after making sure to set the sync settings under the Info tab in iTunes. This will sync your 3GS to the PC. Sync everything, so that you have contacts in Outlook or windows address book, calendar and notes in Outlook, etc. The Info tab tells you what you can sync with. If you screw up, restore from the backup that you made earlier.

Now sync your iPhone 4 and restore from the 3GS backup or just sync it, if you don’t care about losing game saves and app settings and Text messages.

That should fix you up.

Before doing all this you might want to get Funambol (it’s free with a trial) to sync your contacts online to be safe if something gets screwed up.