Restore iPhone 4 backup data to iPhone 3G

[emagination]

A couple weeks ago my iPhone 4 was stolen and never recovered. I'm not up for an upgrade until next year. A friend generously gave me their old iPhone 3G and I just had it activated. My iPhone 4 had the latest firmware update, so obviously it's newer than the latest one supported by the 3G and therefore I get errors telling me the backup is incompatible.

Is there a hack to get around this? I'm really only concerned with getting my contacts loaded into this replacement phone and unfortunately I guess I didn't have it syncing to my Address Book.

 

[nateo200]

Hmm I know generally you can't restore from back up with lower generation iPhones from a back up from like an iPhone 4 but there may be a work around for this. I would give Apple a call and explain your situation and get a solid answer from them. Another alternative would be to jailbreak your iPhone 3G and hack the latest firmware on and see if you can restore that way though no guarentee's with that...that's just purely theoretical in my own mind. Someone else help me out here...

 

[dickdaney]

This kinda happened to me yesterday. I killed my 3GS that had firmware 4.3.3. Went and bought a Verizon iPhone that had 4.2.8 on it. Itunes would not let me restore 4.3 data to 4.2. It apparently only works when you're upgrading the os. Since the 3G can never have 4.3.x on it, you won't be able to restore that data to it. Your only hope is to search your hard drive for an old backup of your iPhone 4 that was on firmware 4.2.x or lower

Luckily for me. I only lost a few pictures that were in the camera roll. All my contacts were synched through gmail

 

[emagination]

Appreciate the replies. Looks like I'm SoL at this point even if there was a way. My previous backup files were overwritten. It seemed like in the past I was able to restore from multiple backup points, so when I first plugged the 3G in and iTunes popped up telling me to set up the phone as new, update to latest firmware, and THEN restore, I didn't think anything of it. The reality is it only keeps one backup instance so when I set it up as new it overwrote my iPhone 4's backup files. I don't have Time Machine setup, either.

Lots of hard lessons learned in this whole experience. Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

Oh, FYI, I did come across whited00r, which is a hacked firmware file to allow you to update older iPhones to the latest OS. Downloaded the file but haven't tried it yet. Had I not overwritten my backup, that might have worked.