After performing what I thought would be a straightforward update to iTunes, Apple also decided that as I had my iPhone plugged in it would update that to OS 3.1. While trying to do both, my iPhone decided to display a "connect to iTunes" message and could not be used. iTunes then told me that my iPhone was unrecognised and that it had to be restored.

That's when the real trouble started..

After performing a factory restore, I had lost all my data. Over 500 photo's of my 2 young children, music, voice recordings of my eldest son plus other stuff that would take forever to get right.

After running the restore, my iPhone asked if I wanted to use a back up (I had made one earlier), great I thought. but alas, trying the back up just made iTunes tell me "sorry, the back up operation could not be performed"

Searching around the net. there were lots of ideas as to the problem but not many solutions that seemed practical (didn't want to jailbreak my phone!). There was nothing in my back ups folder ( ~Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\Mobile Backups) which is where everyone said to look so was resigned to having lost the lot.

After doing some more searching, I found a program that promised to retrieve the back ups and after searching my hard drive for .mdbackup files I FOUND THEM..

They are actually in ~Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

I then found a great little program called iPhone Backup Extractor. This only runs on a Mac though ("Leopard" Mac OS X 10.5 upwards) so I copied my back up folders onto a disk and put them on a friends Mac. Ran the program and voila, all my photos, apps and data recovered.

I cannot tell you how happy this has made me..

If you do use the program and are successful, give a little donation to the creator (I did), It's worth it.

James