Overwritten backups: Any hope?

[porcupine8]

So sometime Friday evening, my iPad 4 started rebooting every three minutes (+- 10 seconds). I saw some people online had success deleting apps til they found the one causing the problem, so I started there.

I backed up before I'd deleted too many, so that I wouldn't lose all my data. I hadn't backed up in three months before that (I know, I know).

Unfortunately, I got down to deleting all my apps and it was still rebooting every three minutes. So now I'm trying to restore it (although my first restore attempt got an error -1, so we'll see if that even works).

Unfortunately, it had to download the latest iOS update before restoring. I left it plugged in while it did that, and didn't notice at first that every time it rebooted it started syncing again (because the "downloading" message was covering up the "syncing" message). By the time I noticed, it had already created a new backup.

I tried Restore from Backup, and it no longer lists my backup from yesterday. The most recent one (besides the current one, which is a backup of an iPad with no apps on it) is from 3 months ago.

Is there ANY hope for finding a backup that's been "overwritten" by a more recent backup? I'm ok with the command line if that will let me dig deeper.

 

[blueroom]

All your purchases are tied to your iTunes account. So you won't lose any apps. Your personal data if you setup iCloud should be easy to recover.

 

[NT1440]

From an apple forum thread:

"1) I needed to run a terminal command to show hidden files w/in finder. Once that was done I could find the directory necessary w/in my Home folder (~library/application support/mobilesync/backup)."

Take a look in there and maybe you'll have some luck, that said backups are incremental so it may not be what you are looking for.

 

[porcupine8]

From an apple forum thread:

"1) I needed to run a terminal command to show hidden files w/in finder. Once that was done I could find the directory necessary w/in my Home folder (~library/application support/mobilesync/backup)."

Take a look in there and maybe you'll have some luck, that said backups are incremental so it may not be what you are looking for.

Thanks! I will take a look in that directory.

IF I ever get it to restore. I keep getting error -1 and it's stuck in DFU. Looks like it's time for a trip to the store... Hopefully whatever's wrong is bad enough they won't notice it's jailbroken.

 

[Night Spring]

I know this may be too late to help with this particular situation, but this is why you should always backup to BOTH your computer and to iCloud. Easiest way to do it is to set your iPad to backup to iCloud, and then whenever you hook it up to your computer, do a manual backup to your computer by hitting the "backup" button in iTunes. Having this setup would also have prevented iTunes from overwriting your backup each time it started another sync.

 

[blueroom]

Thanks! I will take a look in that directory.

IF I ever get it to restore. I keep getting error -1 and it's stuck in DFU. Looks like it's time for a trip to the store... Hopefully whatever's wrong is bad enough they won't notice it's jailbroken.

It's most likely the iPad is fine but your computer is blocking contact with Apple. Try a DFU restore with another computer.