Update 4.2.1 deleted voicemails that were older than 30 days

[Qute]

From what I know, the iPhone stores all voicemail messages on the device.
This is great because AT&T erases them off their servers after 30 days.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3366

Apparently however, the 4.2.1 update process does not seem to backup the stored voicemail messages.
I've lost all messages that were older than 30 days.

 

[saving107]

Not to be rude, but do you need to keep voicemails longer than after you initially heard them?

I'm just wondering.

 

[Qute]

Not to be rude, but do you need to keep voicemails longer than after you initially heard them?

I'm just wondering.

Depending on sender and/or the content of the message, I would say yes!

As text messages are archived, I would expect the same for voicemail messages.

 

[macsrcool1234]

Not to be rude, but do you need to keep voicemails longer than after you initially heard them?

I'm just wondering.

Not to be rude but do you really have to say something so stupid? Discuss the issue at hand (deletion of messages), not the OP's habits.

The OP has a legit concern. I haven't updated to 4.2 yet but I don't want to lose some of my voicemails. Has this happened to anybody else upon upgrading?

 

[sharpycl]

the same thing happened to me upon upgrading.

 

[ivtecDOu]

the same thing happened to me upon upgrading.

x2

 

[Mliii]

Depending on sender and/or the content of the message, I would say yes!

As text messages are archived, I would expect the same for voicemail messages.

I'm really upset by this...my sister died in June and I had a voice message from her that I saved...

 

[Brien]

Yeah. I had an awesome message left by some random guy who called me and left a drunken message. It was hilarious.

 

[IrishVixen]

For those who haven't already upgraded/lost messages, there are tools out there that will allow you to save them off the phone and onto your hard drive before you do so. I use Phone View on the Mac, and that's one of the features I never thought I'd use...but do all the time. It also saves text messages and allows you to export them in different ways.

A similar app for Windows is called Touch Copy. A friend bought it after a well known voice artist left her a special birthday greeting. We were able to pull it from her iPhone, convert it to an mp3 using another app, and now she has it in iTunes for whenever she wants to hear it again.

Both programs have a ton of other features that have made them well worth the $20 or so we paid for them. I'm sure there are other programs out there as well that work similarly. It's just too bad there's no easy way to do this natively through AT&T or Apple.

 

[johnpbart]

for mliii:follow ts elliot's advice

my son passed away one month ago and his last voicemail to my wife has kept her going by listening to it a few times everyday. today i upgraded her iphone to 4.2.1 and the voicemail was gone. someone from my office came over to see what could be done. she plugged in my wife's i phone to itunes then right clicked and then clicked on restore back up and it put my wife's iphone back to the place where i "first started" and there was the voicemail in deleted voicemails. before we try to upgrade her phone to 4.2.1 again, we will have put that voicemail into a safe place away from apple and att. so, ts elliot was right. good luck. sorry for you loss.

 

[Mliii]

my son passed away one month ago and his last voicemail to my wife has kept her going by listening to it a few times everyday. today i upgraded her iphone to 4.2.1 and the voicemail was gone. someone from my office came over to see what could be done. she plugged in my wife's i phone to itunes then right clicked and then clicked on restore back up and it put my wife's iphone back to the place where i "first started" and there was the voicemail in deleted voicemails. before we try to upgrade her phone to 4.2.1 again, we will have put that voicemail into a safe place away from apple and att. so, ts elliot was right. good luck. sorry for you loss.

Thank you...and the same goes for you.
I discovered that I DID in fact have a back up and was able to extract a copy of this message using Phone View. It's now safely stored on a disk as an MPEG4 file.