I don't understand (mystery magic file transfer from nowhere)

Drez

Yesterday, my iPhone broke in a spectacular fashion. It is a complete disaster.

I had 120 gigs worth of photos on my iPhone. I had a lot of trouble getting either my PC or my MacBook to recognize that I even had any photos on my device. Eventually, by connecting and disconnecting and reconnecting my iPhone to my PC over the course of about 6 hours, I was able to manually transfer all the 31,069 photos and videos on my iPhone to my PC.

My insurance-claim replacement iPhone arrives.

I had no recent backup.

I managed to make a backup of my broken iPhone on my MacBook. The iPhone backup is about 40-50 GB (the size of all my apps with no photos).

I suffer through Apple's terrible backup and restore workflow which I won't even bother discussing. But anyway, I finally restored my new iPhone with my old iPhone's backup.

I now have roughly the same amount of photos (31,000ish) on my new iPhone.

They definitely weren't in the backup of the old iPhone.

Both the backup and the restore did not happen on the computer that I manually backed up my 31,000 photos and videos.

I do not use iCloud.

Where the fuck did my photos and videos restore from?!?!

Shadowfire

Have your photos been backing up into Photos on the MacBook?

Drez

Shadowfire wrote: »

Have your photos been backing up into Photos on the MacBook?

Nope. Photos app is empty, had formatted the MacBook a couple of months ago, plus I (counterintuitively) use my PC to organize my iPhone and photos.

dispatch.o

If you have an iphone I believe you have cloud storage by default, which it will back up whenever you're on wifi. You should check itunes and look around.

Drez

dispatch.o wrote: »

If you have an iphone I believe you have cloud storage by default, which it will back up whenever you're on wifi. You should check itunes and look around.

Nope.

I mean, yep, by default, but that's not where my photos came from. I disabled that when I got my iPhone 4S many years ago and never turned it back on.

Not to mention, I'm talking about 120 gigs of photos and videos. I think you get, what, 5 gigs or maybe 20 gigs by default? Certainly not 120.

I just logged into iCloud and confirmed I have zero photos and videos loaded to it.

So I remain stumped.

EclecticGroove

The size of the backup, even with compression, isn't enough to account for all the apps + photo/video data unless they were able to be compressed super small. Not sure if Apple lets you look at the backup to see what's in it or not however.

But my guess would be that it did a temp backup to the cloud where it didn't actually keep the data there after it restored. Either that or it was able to pull it from your old phone if it was still on your wifi network, but that seems incredibly unlikely to me.

Drez

EclecticGroove wrote: »

The size of the backup, even with compression, isn't enough to account for all the apps + photo/video data unless they were able to be compressed super small. Not sure if Apple lets you look at the backup to see what's in it or not however.

But my guess would be that it did a temp backup to the cloud where it didn't actually keep the data there after it restored. Either that or it was able to pull it from your old phone if it was still on your wifi network, but that seems incredibly unlikely to me.

Old phone was off during the restore.

Also, the restore took around 50 minutes. Pulling the data from the aetherwebs makes some sense but damned if I know where it was uploaded to.

Frankly, I’m creeped out.

EclecticGroove

Drez wrote: »

EclecticGroove wrote: »

The size of the backup, even with compression, isn't enough to account for all the apps + photo/video data unless they were able to be compressed super small. Not sure if Apple lets you look at the backup to see what's in it or not however.

But my guess would be that it did a temp backup to the cloud where it didn't actually keep the data there after it restored. Either that or it was able to pull it from your old phone if it was still on your wifi network, but that seems incredibly unlikely to me.

Old phone was off during the restore.

Also, the restore took around 50 minutes. Pulling the data from the aetherwebs makes some sense but damned if I know where it was uploaded to.

Frankly, I’m creeped out.

Likely a temp icloud based on your apple id.

Kind of like the old xbox 360 migration utility used to temporarily upload everything on your old 360 HDD to MS and then pull it back down to the new system.
It wouldn't use any of your online storage because it was only there for a short amount of time.

And 50 minutes (assuming you have a fairly decent internet connection) seems like more than enough time to do that. If it was all local, I'd expect the process to have only taken a few minutes.

Darkewolfe

I'm going to go ahead and say it's user error and you DID have a backup function enabled somewhere and just don't realize it.

But I work in IT and 99% of everything is user error, even though you swear it's absolutely not you promise.

Drez

It may be user error but that doesn’t answer my question: where may it have been backed up to? I’ve 100% confirmed it wasn’t via iCloud (unless it was some kind of temporary function of iCloud that only kicks in during a backup and restore) and it wasn’t via the backup file on my MacBook. What other possibilities are there?

Daenris

I would try to find an iphone backup reader (maybe this: http://www.imactools.com/iphonebackupviewer/ though I have no experience with it) and take a look at the 50GB backup file. My guess would be there's a ton of compression going on and that it actually contains all your apps/etc + photos, but that would depend on what format the photos are stored at initially (i.e. how much they're already compressed).

Drez

Daenris wrote: »

I would try to find an iphone backup reader (maybe this: http://www.imactools.com/iphonebackupviewer/ though I have no experience with it) and take a look at the 50GB backup file. My guess would be there's a ton of compression going on and that it actually contains all your apps/etc + photos, but that would depend on what format the photos are stored at initially (i.e. how much they're already compressed).

I guess that’s possible, but it literally would have had to compress 170-180 gigs into 40-50 which seems implausible.

But you make a good point. I have iExplorer - I’ll try that tonight.

Daenris

That's pretty easily done if the images are not already JPGs or something already compressed. This site: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php has a bunch of examples of compression. That particular one is a blend of different file types, and many of the compression methods get 70%+ compression, which is what your file would be. But if 120GB of the data was already JPGs, it's really unlikely there could be that much compression.

Soggybiscuit

I don't think Apple stores the apps in backups anymore, just the settings; I think when you do a backup and restore it just re-downloads all the apps, since that's easier and ensures you have the latest version. I would guess the backup only contains your photos and app settings.

Drez

Daenris wrote: »

That's pretty easily done if the images are not already JPGs or something already compressed. This site: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php has a bunch of examples of compression. That particular one is a blend of different file types, and many of the compression methods get 70%+ compression, which is what your file would be. But if 120GB of the data was already JPGs, it's really unlikely there could be that much compression.

A lot of it is screenshots.