This post is brought to you by Tenorshare, maker of iPhone Data Recovery for Mac.
Sometimes it’s helpful to think of your iPhone for what it actually is: a sleek and fragile glass box where you keep lots of really important information. Luckily, it’s a box you can back up, but pretty much only by using iTunes or iCloud — not exactly user-empowering tools for protecting and recovering your data.
Tenorshare’s iPhone Data Recovery for Mac offers a third option, and it packs three different ways of getting your phone’s contents back. Not only does it provide its own backup and recovery service, but it can also restore your iOS device from iCloud and iTunes backups.
In fact, Tenorshare will let you preview and select 20 different categories of files through an easy-to-use menu interface: photos, contacts, SMS exchanges, notes, calendars, voicemails, call histories, in-app data and documents, and lots of others. You can directly select the individual files you want to restore, or select them in batches. They can even be saved in alternative formats like .txt, .xls, .xml and .jpg.
This is a huge time-saver when you’d rather skip the hassle of a full backup. Plus, it’s all fully compatible with any iPhone from model 4 on up, iTunes versions 12.2 and later, and iOS 9 onward.
How iPhone Data Recovery for Mac works
Using iPhone Data Recovery for Mac’s interface quickly reveals the key to the software’s value. Scanning your phone takes just a few minutes, after which the entire contents of your phone is immediately made available in a list at the left of the screen.
From there, you can select any category, whether it’s phone-native or in-app. See a WhatsApp conversation you’d like to review? Just click on it and you’ll see segments of the dialog you’d lost. Same goes for images, texts, call histories, the works.
What happens if you haven’t run Tenorshare’s backup but still need to find a missing file? Downloading and opening the iCloud or iTunes backup files is a matter of a couple clicks, after which iPhone Data Recovery for Mac’s menu options become available for their contents.
iPhone data recovery made easy
It all makes recovering lost iPhone data easier than it seems it should be. The experience is actually eerie — the app thoroughly digs through all your phone’s drawers, and your phone becomes a sort of time capsule as things you thought were long gone suddenly reappear in the list of recovered files.
In future versions, we’re hoping the preview function will be made more powerful to allow for zooming in on images, reading messages in their entirety, watching videos, etc. And using iPhone Data Recovery for Mac on a MacBook Pro (it’s also available for Windows) makes Retina support another wish-list item.
But even as it stands, iPhone Data Recovery for Mac is a significant improvement over the “locked box” of iTunes and iCloud backup. We recommend you take the software for a free spin — it’ll change the way you think about keeping the contents of your little glass box safe.
