How to get photos off iPhone? Out hard drive died and it's the only backup!

[Whenisitmysleepytime]

The external harddrive thingy died and it has all our photos on. :(
We have a back up of everything up to feb this year but after that the only copies are on the iPhone and iPods.

How do you get the pictures off?
You can't get at them in any obvious way such a looking in finder as far as I can see. ( we have a mac)

Please help all dd's birth photos aren't backed up! :(

"I have them all on my MacBook and external backup drive and also on my iPad - the iPhone only has a couple of albums plus those I've taken on it. "

Niceguy was referring to this earlier....

When you sync photos onto an iOS device using iTunes it does not put the full high quality photo on the device (well not on iPhones and iTouches anyway, iPads might be different, but I wouldn't want to say that for certain), instead it resizes it to be something appropriate for the device. So if you then try and get that photos back off of the iOS device you'll find them to be smaller than the originals and detail will be lost.

So don't use syncing of photos to an iOS device as a backup.

This is different to photos that are taken on the device and synced from it.

Can I just ask in what sense the external drive has died? Does it make any noise at all when you switch it on? Have you tried running Disk Utility on it and if you have, what does it say? You may be able to recover the files yourself.

Yes, it is the same on the iPad - my photos take up 28Gb on the Mac and less than 5 on the iPad, so that's quite a difference.

Normally if I'm going out taking photos I take the iPad with me and download the photos from my camera card to the iPad soon after taking them, but I always leave them on the card and download them again to the Macbook as soon as I get home. I don't regard the iPad as backup, it's just in case I drop my camera in the sea or something (advice from my FIL who did just that) It's also a nice way of reviewing the photos while you're still at the place you took them.

The most pragmatic solution I've heard for an "offsite" backup is to copy to a hard disk and leave it in the car. I've encrypted my disk and left it with a neighbour but the car thing is just as good. At the end of the day it's not the end of the world if someone breaks into your car and nicks it. Chances are they'll just wipe the disk and sell it. Your photos are not really interesting for a thief unless you've taken "saucy" ones!

Ok... To get back on track yes not backing everything up in multiple locations all the time is silly etc etc.

Anyhow to answer niceguy it's a wireless hard drive/ net box I believe. The mac can see it but not connect. Dh googled the problem with it and all answers came back "you're screwed" essentially.

We can email the pics or upload to flickr etc (which is where I'm gonna store my favourites) but they don't appear as full resolution.

It's not looking good... :(

OK, so it sounds like a NAS or a time machine then. What's the exact make/model and what's the message when you try to connect to it?

Basically the critical bit of information is to know whether or not the disk is physically damaged. If it's not then your data can be retrieved.

But given it's a NAS device and not a PC or simple external hard disk, whatever you do, don't let the monkey's at PCWorld loose on it!

There's a whole range of things that could be wrong and I would have thought that data would be recoverable from most of them, but if it's a catastrophic disk failure it could be serious money. A decent computer store (not PCW) should be be able to extract and test the actual disk. If the disk is dead, then it would need to go to a specialist. If it's something else that has broken, they should be able to get your data back for a lot less than £700.

I've never had to use a data recovery specialist, so I can't tell you who is good or what the likely charges might be. The ones I have heard of are Ontrack Data Recovery.

There are websites that store your photos in full resolution & allow you to download them in full resolution, like Famipix. There is a small monthly fee, but you can pay it just for one month while you cover your photos from iPhone.

Re resizing photos on external storage:

Does anyone know if Time Capsule stores my photos in full resolution during automatic syncs?

Time Capsule does yes.

Can I please just echo niceguy2 - do NOT let PC World anywhere near it if you want any hope of getting those pics back.

Please tell us exactly what product you have and all and any error messages you get. If PC World are saying that they can recover the data but will charge you the earth to do so, then unless they've done no diagnosis at all and are just BSing (not exactly infeasible I'm afraid ) I would think that it's quite likely that they know that your hard drive hasn't physically failed and that you're just dealing with a hw interface failure (i.e. they'll swap the drive into a working housing and Bob's your uncle) or some data corruption - which may or may not be recoverable.

Having a Linux file system does not mean that it's "weird" - just that PC World are severely Microsoft OS biased and their technicians are generally very dim...