iPhone 6+: PLEASE help. Forgot passcode, 1 shot left, not backed up :(

[Brian Y]

I know, I was commenting on the anal retentiveness of having a server and then mirroring it to boot.

It's not anal retentiveness. It's called having an off-site backup.

If there is a house fire here, having a local backup would be pointless. Hence why it's good practice to have a backup in multiple locations. Given the price of VPSs, or if you're not that technically inclined, things like crashplan/dropbox, having stuff backed up off-site is something everybody should be doing.

If there is a fire, it's bad enough. Possessions can be replaced, but the 50 years of family photographs I have digitised cannot be.

 

[26139]

Yup

It's not anal retentiveness. It's called having an off-site backup.

If there is a house fire here, having a local backup would be pointless. Hence why it's good practice to have a backup in multiple locations. Given the price of VPSs, or if you're not that technically inclined, things like crashplan/dropbox, having stuff backed up off-site is something everybody should be doing.

If there is a fire, it's bad enough. Possessions can be replaced, but the 50 years of family photographs I have digitised cannot be.

My setup: MBP and Mac Mini in the house. Dropbox has all important files, and is synced to both computers. iCloud Photos is also turned on, which syncs with iPhoto, whose library is in a Dropbox folder. They share a partitioned TM backup.

Every 1-3 months when I visit my parents, I make sure dropbox is syncing my important files to my account on my dad's iMac, which also has a TM backup.

To lose important files, both our homes and Dropbox servers would have to burn down, with everything inside.

I don't consider this anal retentive, I consider it a necessary part of running a freelance business.

My parents, neither of whom are super tech savvy, have all of this automated, too. Didn't take me more than 20 minutes to set it up.

 

[klo6]

It's not anal retentiveness. It's called having an off-site backup.

If there is a house fire here, having a local backup would be pointless. Hence why it's good practice to have a backup in multiple locations. Given the price of VPSs, or if you're not that technically inclined, things like crashplan/dropbox, having stuff backed up off-site is something everybody should be doing.

If there is a fire, it's bad enough. Possessions can be replaced, but the 50 years of family photographs I have digitised cannot be.

^ This!

I agree!!! I would be devastated to lose my pics! I have a local external HD (which I keep in a fireproof box when I'm not actively adding something to it) and I use Picasa to organize all of my pics. I like that it uploads them online as a secondary backup. As a bonus, this also allows me to use an app to look at any pic on the go.

 

[noobinator]

I backup all my photos to Amazon Prime for free. Videos go one my main laptop, a time machine, and an external HD that I keep off site and update once a month.

 

[FieldingMellish]

I back up to a RAID drive and swap one of its internal cartridge drives to an offsite location. But I could do more and there are a few good ideas in this thread.

 

[s15119]

I don't believe any of this story. Too many changes, like the OP can't keep her lies straight. It's likely a stolen phone. The only option is to know the simple 4 digit passcode you claim you set. Blaming Apple will not help.

 

[Greenone]

I don't believe any of this story. Too many changes, like the OP can't keep her lies straight. It's likely a stolen phone. The only option is to know the simple 4 digit passcode you claim you set. Blaming Apple will not help.

Thanks to all of you who've been honestly trying to help. I'd respond to you each individually but I'm exhausted (lucky you) by this whole thing and can't deal with it right now. Just got off with Apple rep again and he's going to talk to engineering tomorrow and get back to me. Not willing to pull the plug yet...trying everything I can think of, first.

As for the lovely person who's accusing me of lying, and his thumbs-up cronies, you're either trying to bring more unnecessary negative energy to this thread just for kicks (I know there are a lot of 12 year-olds hanging out here), or you're dorkishly paranoid, or you haven't really read my comments. Any inconsistency within my "story" is due to not remembering such details. In part, from not having fully understood how to properly use the new phone as well as how to properly back up...e.g. not understanding how the cloud works (which I thought was more like Dropbox and wouldn't work with my maxed-capacity laptop), or how/when touch i.d. works. I'm just a mid-40s busy mom of 3 wild kids who doesn't have time for all this ****. Not a tech-savvy computer nerd. Capiche? Believe me or don't, big guy.

 

[KPOM]

Thanks to all of you who've been honestly trying to help. I'd respond to you each individually but I'm exhausted (lucky you) by this whole thing and can't deal with it right now. Just got off with Apple rep again and he's going to talk to engineering tomorrow and get back to me. Not willing to pull the plug yet...trying everything I can think of, first.

I don't know if this will work (since the device might need to be "trusted") but there is a third party application called iMazing that lets you access iPhone and iPad contents and write data to/from apps directly, as well as initiate a backup. It is a paid program, but I believe it has a trial period.

 

[Greenone]

I don't know if this will work (since the device might need to be "trusted") but there is a third party application called iMazing that lets you access iPhone and iPad contents and write data to/from apps directly, as well as initiate a backup. It is a paid program, but I believe it has a trial period.

Yes I tried it, thanks. It says I need to put in my iPhone passcode, lol.

 

[I7guy]

I can't offer any advice that hasn't been given, but just want to mention that I can understand how the OP could have forgotten their password. It happens in legitimate circumstances and I can imagine it's very frustrating. It almost happened to me once and it was no fun.

I have my Exchange account for email/calendar on my iPhone for work (it's that or carry two phones, which I'm not a fan of) and due to my organization's security measures I have to change my password every 30 days, using 8 or more characters with at least a mix of capital and lowercase letters, special characters, and numbers. I can't use passwords that are similar at all to a number of previous passwords (I'm not sure what this number is, but I know its at least over 12).

One day back when I had my 4S last year I was trail running with a friend. It was early spring, we were at about 2,000 meters elevation, it was raining, foggy, getting dark, and we were a good 12 kilometers from the nearest civilization. I was feeling great, but in the low visibility my friend and I got separated. One of us made a wrong turn at an intersection of a few trails. I went to unlock my phone to check my GPX file for our pre-agreed upon route and to use the Find My Friends app to see where he was, and up came the "you must change your password" notice. I couldn't do anything except call an emergency number, but I needed the maps and apps on my phone to find my friend and also make sure we get back to civilization.

After trying futily for all the passwords of 8+ characters that I could easily remember, I was getting annoyed and worried that I would make a password and forget it, thus getting locked out of my iPhone like the OP. I keep daily backups so I wasn't worried about my data or photos, but the more time that went by the more worried I was getting that I wouldn't be able to find my friend. I didn't have a pen and paper with me, and the last thing you want to do in the cold and rain on a mountain is stop running, stand there and think through the most ideal password combination for your phone, all while getting colder and more separated from your running partner.

So I decided to make a new password and keep repeating it to myself until I could make a note of it in the notes app. Once I did that, I took a screen shot of the notes app with my new password on it and set it as my lock screen background and wallpaper. Not very secure, but that way at least I could use my phone until I got off the mountain and back home. If I didn't do this I'm pretty sure I would have forgotten my password by the next time I needed to use my phone.

Anyway, because I was able to use my phone I was able to find my friend and we got off of the mountain without any problems. That was the first time I ever thought about forgetting my password and it was disconcerting. So, TL;DR, OP I can totally understand where you're coming from and I hope you're able to get your data and photos back somehow, and also make sure to keep regular backups in the future.

This is not really the same situation as the ops even though my phone has a similar policy due to exchange. I had a similar thing happen with my password in the most inopportune of places. There is no one-time 24 hour deferment, when the message pops up you have to change it. It absolutely stinks if you are in the middle of something, as you described.

 

[VTECaddict]

Sorry to say this, but I don't think there's a way to retrieve your stuff other than entering the correct passcode.

Law enforcement agencies are getting angry at Apple and Google for encrypting phone data because they have no way to decrypt a phone without the passcode/password. If it was as simple as hooking it up to a computer and running a program or having a back door access to it, it wouldn't be a big deal at all.

Just remember to setup your iCloud backup the next time around. It's completely hands off and all runs in the background, just set it and forget it.

It's a security feature and it should be considered a good thing that it's not able to be circumvented, although I know this is a terrible situation for you. Best of luck with Apple, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

[Greenone]

Sorry to say this, but I don't think there's a way to retrieve your stuff other than entering the correct passcode.

Law enforcement agencies are getting angry at Apple and Google for encrypting phone data because they have no way to decrypt a phone without the passcode/password. If it was as simple as hooking it up to a computer and running a program or having a back door access to it, it wouldn't be a big deal at all.

Just remember to setup your iCloud backup the next time around. It's completely hands off and all runs in the background, just set it and forget it.

It's a security feature and it should be considered a good thing that it's not able to be circumvented, although I know this is a terrible situation for you. Best of luck with Apple, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Thank you. I don't have high hopes, I just don't have any choice but to try my hardest to find SOME way to make this work, until there's absolutely no hope (geez I sound like I'm dying, lol). I know Apple won't want to give me a new phone but there's this part of me that feels like asking for a new phone and then just not ever typing in that last (and probably wrong) passcode on this current phone. Because as long as I DON'T, the pictures will still be in there somewhere, 10 years later! I feel like giving them my current phone to hold onto (if they'd allow any of this, and duh, I know they wouldn't) as evidence my purpose isn't to just get a free phone out of them and sell one or something like that...and then one day they might change their way of doing things just enough for me to get my photos back. I know it's just a fantasy (and it would be a fairly ridiculous request) but it keeps going through my head nonetheless! Ah, desperation... I know I'm holding on like a bulldog to this idea of finding a solution. We'll see. I know it doesn't look good at all.

 

[Jstuts5797]

Any updates? The OP has me on the edge of my seating waiting to hear the outcome. Hope you can recover these photos!

 

[Greenone]

Any updates? The OP has me on the edge of my seating waiting to hear the outcome. Hope you can recover these photos!

Thanks for asking - makes me feel less alone just knowing someone cares, lol. I was supposed to hear back from my guy yesterday but haven't heard from him yet (that I know of - we're actually having landline issues if you can believe it). He said to contact customer relations if we hit a wall and asked that I wait through yesterday before contacting them just so he'd have a chance to try our last couple of tries. Those tries were that he'd contact both a friend with a 6+ who is going to go through all the steps again as I did (turned out my guy used his iPod, which directed him to go to iTunes and which allowed him to see his photos again there, but it wasn't apples to apples even though theoretically it should be, because it wasn't a phone). I probably made him nervous about using his own phone haha! The other try is that he was going to contact engineering to see what they suggest. Either he hasn't heard back from them yet or he's just really busy, I don't know (or he can't reach me).

So, I'm actually on hold right now with Apple, as I type. The guy who answered the general # was aware of my situation without asking for my case # (haha there's probably a flag hooked up to my number!) and he was really nice and is contacting the customer relations dept. for me right now. I don't have high hopes of course but feel good about trying everything possible that I can think of. Even this guy - unless he's putting me on - seems to agree that a new phone is a reasonable request (thereby not having to lose all the photos in my present one, in case there's any hope that this may be able to be resolved at a later date).

Thank you...

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On a side note, GOD I miss being able to use my phone! A friend came over last night who just got the 6+ new for herself and I was green with envy! I'll never complain about my gigantic phone again, hahaha. I LOVE the big size (I've gone back and forth about it)...my withdrawals haven't subsided one bit. I'm in technology hell!!!

On another side note, I really wish Apple would give us more songs in their on-hold music loop! It's getting old Apple!

 

[JayLenochiniMac]

Even this guy - unless he's putting me on - seems to agree that a new phone is a reasonable request (thereby not having to lose all the photos in my present one, in case there's any hope that this may be able to be resolved at a later date)

So you're actually requesting that Apple provides you a free new iPhone for your own screwup?

 

[noobinator]

Alcohol claims another victim.

 

[tdale]

Beats me why Apple cannot have a reset PW solution. What happens if I forget my bank password, my money is gone forever?

It should be " cannot reset over the phone, go to a store, quote this case number, bring 3 forms of ID including one photo ID and two items that show name and street address as per the Apple ID setup. Then we will reset in the store for you"

 

[JayLenochiniMac]

Beats me why Apple cannot have a reset PW solution. What happens if I forget my bank password, my money is gone forever?

It should be " cannot reset over the phone, go to a store, quote this case number, bring 3 forms of ID including one photo ID and two items that show name and street address as per the Apple ID setup. Then we will reset in the store for you"

They can most certainly reset it. What the OP is asking is equivalent to forcing the bank to reveal the password that you've forgotten, rather than reset with a new password and your money is still safe.

Sorry, but when it comes to security, you can't eat your cake and have it too. That's why people back up their stuff on a regular basis.

 

[tdale]

They can most certainly reset it. What the OP is asking is equivalent to forcing the bank to reveal the password that you've forgotten, rather than reset with a new password and your money is still safe.

Sorry, but when it comes to security, you can't eat your cake and have it too. That's why people back up their stuff on a regular basis.

Either way the bank knows and tells you the password, whether that is THe or A password.

The moral of the story is lose your iPhone if you forget the passcode, or lose your money if you forget the bank password?

 

[Greenone]

So you're actually requesting that Apple provides you a free new iPhone for your own screwup?

Not because I'm stupid enough to think they'd say yes... you wouldn't understand.

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Alcohol claims another victim.

Haha so true...

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Beats me why Apple cannot have a reset PW solution. What happens if I forget my bank password, my money is gone forever?

It should be " cannot reset over the phone, go to a store, quote this case number, bring 3 forms of ID including one photo ID and two items that show name and street address as per the Apple ID setup. Then we will reset in the store for you"

This. So true, so reasonable.

 

[tdale]

Does Apple have visbility of the passcode? Or is it only on the phone?

 

[Greenone]

They can most certainly reset it. What the OP is asking is equivalent to forcing the bank to reveal the password that you've forgotten, rather than reset with a new password and your money is still safe.

Sorry, but when it comes to security, you can't eat your cake and have it too. That's why people back up their stuff on a regular basis.

Yes but what YOU'RE FORGETTING is that I didn't ask to have my cake in the first place. I specifically pressed "NO" to whether or not I wanted my phone to erase everything after 10 failed passcode attempts. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I believe Apple mislead me to feel a false sense of security in how many times I could put in the "maybe this is it" passcode, when they gave me the option to erase after 10 failed passcode attempts for my own security. By saying no to that, I was essentially saying "no thanks - I'd rather have less security." Don't you get that? And then as it is, they only give you a few more tries before the same end-result takes place. Just weeks ago even, that wasn't the case. And there's been no warning - it just happens. Granted most people have iCloud - I get that - but I misunderstood how iCloud works. I shouldn't be treated like **** by you or anyone else just because I didn't understand that or for the other flukish reasons that I hadn't backed up. This was the only time I've ever not backed up or thought it wasn't an option.

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Does Apple have visbility of the passcode? Or is it only on the phone?

Apple has no clue what the password is. They can't see it, can't retrieve it...supposedly even the FBI would have no luck. I find this hard to believe but so be it. Maybe I'll feel better later but for now, I am no longer an Apple Fangirl lol.

 

[JayLenochiniMac]

Either way the bank knows and tells you the password, whether that is THe or A password.

The moral of the story is lose your iPhone if you forget the passcode, or lose your money if you forget the bank password?

As indicated earlier in the thread, Apple has made it impossible to brute force the iPhone to keep the government out of the customers' business. Unlike the bank, Apple doesn't know your password.

 

[lordofthereef]

It's not anal retentiveness. It's called having an off-site backup.

If there is a house fire here, having a local backup would be pointless. Hence why it's good practice to have a backup in multiple locations. Given the price of VPSs, or if you're not that technically inclined, things like crashplan/dropbox, having stuff backed up off-site is something everybody should be doing.

If there is a fire, it's bad enough. Possessions can be replaced, but the 50 years of family photographs I have digitised cannot be.

I've been using Flickr for this exact reason. Can't beat free.

We've taken 8000 pics of my son. He is 14 months old. We have problems lol. Luckily 1tb should still take many many years to fill.

 

[Jstuts5797]

Sounds like they are doing everything they can to try to help you. Maybe there is still hope!

As for liking the 6+, I love mine too. And I didn't buy a new phone until I could play with both the 6 and 6+ myself. When I made the purchase I still wasn't sure I made the right choice but now I sure as heck am. This thing is AWESOME! Good luck to you and try to keep us updated!