Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25728970-20141120065516/@comment-24886041-20141121011802

Even though this is spam, I decided to keep the first part, as it's a reasonable discussion topic.

I'd like to address some of the assertions:

1. "I think nobody will carry a digital camera or SLRs with him all the time in case that they need photo shoot."

- I may be an outlier, but my back pocket holds the iPhone, and my front pocket holds a Nikon Coolpix -- it's waterproof, shock resistant, GPS-aware and has a battery that lasts forever. Takes great high speed video, and takes SD cards. Also has good quality optics and a decent sensor. And goes everywhere in my pocket, unless I'm not wearing pockets, in which case it goes on a strap across my chest. There's no way I'm going to be handling an iPhone in all the situations where I have no issue using the Nikon.

2. "Basically, I backup my images once a week but sometimes was just too busy to make a backup after a long business journey. All photos are stored in my iPhone and I couldn’t afford losing any of the them."

- Huh? Does this actually describe a real person? You can set the iPhone to back up to the cloud, or you can set it to sync to a computer. Considering how short the battery life is on an iPhone, you're going to have to plug it in to charge it regularly, so why not set things up so that all your photos get backed up at the same time, either over Wifi, or via a sync/charge cable? Not doing this seems silly.

3. "First I avoid suggestion of any 3rd party software because I don’t trust those kind of tools. What disappoint me most is 80% info are related to “Data Recovery Software”. After viewing more than 10 pages, I change my mind in the end. Maybe I can have a look at all those programs and make a comparison list to analyze which one is the highest cost performance."

- First statement is a good one to go for -- if you see software spammed on forums that claims to recover data or photos or contacts or something else off of iPhones, steer clear of it; if they have to stoop that low, the software isn't worth letting on to your system.

- Having stated that, this "reviewer" goes on to look at 10+ pages of search results, even after stating she doesn't trust the results. The reviewer just lost all credibility.

- Then the reviewer purports to have downloaded and tested a significant number of those pieces of software... however, that's pretty much impossible. Why? Most of these downloads are bundleware, that load software belonging to other affiliates on to your system in exchange for a kickback; that other software is even more dodgy. However, after doing this, most of these downloads are also "trialware" -- they'll list the files that they "could" recover, but to do so, you need to pay $$ -- at which point you'll find that most of the files can't be recovered anyway. So if this reviewer actually subjected their PC to this abuse, they'd be out hundreds of dollars with very little to show for it.

Better to just use the tools Apple provides: back up to the cloud, or back up to your computer, and do it regularly. For bonus marks, back up your computer to Time Machine, and for the Top of the Class award, rotate your Time Machine drives, keeping one stored remotely, in an out-of-area friend's place, or in a safety deposit box. Oh, and ensure it's encrypted (and your iPhone too). And yes, if you're using encryption, you can't recover ANY of your photos, as the data on the device would be totally scrambled in a situation where you lost the photos.