It’s happened to everyone at some point. You lose the data on your phone or even lose your phone itself. You may feel as if all is lost, but it doesn’t have to be. You can easily save all your data, even if you’ve never backed up before. You can accomplish this with Primo iPhone Data Recovery. It allows you to recover data directly from your device, from an iTunes backup, and also from iCloud. It will recover photos, videos, messages, contacts, call history, etc. Because users often want to recover Messages and Contacts, Primo has created easy to follow instructions for retrieving deleted text messages and retrieving deleted contacts. Additionally, it gives you repair tools for times when you’re stuck on a black screen or in an endless restarting loop. Basically, it saves your digital life.
Using Primo iPhone Data Recovery
Primo iPhone Data Recovery can be downloaded for either Windows or Mac. A personal license, allowing you to download it to one machine, will cost you $39.99, while a family license, allowing you to use it on up to five machines, will cost $59.99. Either way, you can download it initially for free to do a free scan of your device to see if you want to invest the money in a full license. For the purposes of this review I used the Mac license on a 2011 Mac Mini.
Recovery Options
Everyone has a different preferred way of backing up their device, and regrettably some don’t do it at all. No matter your current backup process, even if you have none, there are still recovery options for you, with each explained in full on the website so that you can choose the appropriate method. In the Settings before you start, you can change the software to save to your choice of folders and also choose the output format of your various files. Just be sure to do this before you begin the recovery. I have a newer iPhone and iPad and back up everything to iCloud. Recovering from iCloud would be too easy, though, so I dug up my old iPhone 5 that I retired last year and tried to do a recovery of what was still stored on my device.
The message on the screen instructed me to connect my device. So I plugged my old iPhone into my Mac. It then asked me to unlock my device and to click “Trust” on the popup on my phone. I then clicked “Yes, I known” on my Mac.
I received a message telling me that my iPhone was connected and had to click OK on my Mac.
On the ensuing screen a picture of an iPhone appeared, along with the name of my old phone, LB’s iPhone 2. I clicked the big blue button that read “Next” to proceed to the next step.
Primo then went to work analyzing the content on my iPhone. It took considerable time, but this was because of two reasons: for one, I’m using a really old Mac Mini that is exceptionally slow, and for another, the reason I stopped using this iPhone was that it had little memory and was full. So there was a lot of data to analyze by a very slow machine.
Once it’s done analyzing your device, it presents you with all the possible files that you can save. They haven’t been downloaded yet. Primo is just letting you know what’s on there should you decide to recover it. Because my phone was so full, some files had been overwritten, at least in part. I chose to recover a few things that had since been updated on my newer iPhone. I also chose to recover my Message Attachments, as I was interested to see what it would recover. Since I store everything in iCloud, I never bother to delete my old messages, just letting them all be stored in iCloud. I clicked the checkboxes for what I wanted to save and clicked the big blue button that read “Recover.”
This took a very long time. Again, I’m using an ancient computer and a full iPhone, and I was trying to recover attachments from several years. It was already late at night, so I went to bed and let it finish overnight and had a “Completed” message the next day.
All this info was now saved to both my iCloud folder as well as my Documents folder. Because I have iCloud on both my Mac and my iPhone, I can easily move the files out of my iCloud folder on my phone into where they belong. But without iCloud, I would need to transfer through iTunes or another method. And indeed, every single message attachment dating back to 2010 was recovered. It’s understandable then that it took so long to recover it all. That’s seven years worth of attachments!
Restoring Data to Your Computer
Additionally, other than just recovering your files, you can also fix your iOS system crashes and issues as well. Unfortunately I couldn’t test this feature since I don’t have a device that’s experiencing issues. But it would have definitely come in handy last fall. When my iPhone 7 was a few weeks old, I did a system update, and it sent me into an endless reboot. I tried every recovery method known to man, and none of them worked. I had to spend half a day taking it in to the Genius Bar where they just ended up replacing it. It’s great to have another option in my pocket such as this!
Conclusion
All in all, Primo iPhone Data Recovery will save your digital life. It can recover your data no matter how you back up or even if you never back up and can even repair your phone when you think all is lost. For me, instead of just downloading it when you have the need for it, I can see downloading it to keep it around so that it’s available in those emergencies. The more and more you do on your phone, such as adding, deleting, updating, saving, etc., the less and less chance you have of recovering everything, so why not keep this software around so that you can recover or repair when you need to and not risk losing anything?
