IPhone backup is corrupted and not visible in ITunes. Can I recover the data on it?

Question

Hi,
I am a Win 7 user. I recently upgraded my iphone 4 from ios 4 to ios 5. It seems that the upgrade process deletes all the data and then it recovers it from ITunes or ICloud backup. I did have only one backup and it was on ITunes. However, during the backup process I had some kind of error telling me that the backup is corrupted or something like that. Unfortunately I didnt pay enough attention to the error in order to quote it here. What happenned next is that the IPhone was stuck on the Conect to ITunes screen even thou it was already connected. Every time I was connecting the Iphone to ITunes, it was syncing, but it kept being stuck on that Connect to ITunes screen. To resolve this, I tried the Restore from a backup option by right clicking on the Iphone in ITunes. There I had only one choice of backup which was with no date. This solved the Connect to ITunes problem and the IPhone was up and running.
The next problem was that once I configured the IPhone, I had no data on it - no pictures, no contacts, no anything apart programs I have downloaded previously from AppStore.
A friend of mine assisted me, and showed me where the backups are stored on win 7 systems:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup
My understanding is that you have as many backups as folders in the Backup folder above. I don't see however one of the folders in the ITunes Restore from Backup list. It is the largest and oldest folder - nearly 2GB. All the rest is like 30-40mb. I believe that any chance I may have to restore any information from my IPhone is by restoring this backup and being able to upload it to the IPhone or read it somehow. My friend discovered that the .plist files are missing in this folder. In particular 4 files: info.plist, manifest.mbdb, manifest.plist and status.plist.
We tried to cheat a bit by copying these files from one of the other backup folders. We also renamed some of the codes in one or two of the files, like the name of the folder, data and hour in info.plist. It didnt work. This folder remains unvisible by ITunes and therefore I cannot use it as backup.
Your help is much appreciated for finding a solution on that one,
Peppy

Answer 1

gdgmacguy wrote:
If your backup is corrupted you cannot retrieve data from it.
I've been working on a tool that repairs most iPhone (iPad, iPod Touch) backups that iTunes reports as corrupted -- it seems to be working fairly well for people we've had using it lately! If someone stumbles on this post and wants to try it out, the program is Decipher Backup Repair, and you can try it here:
http://deciphertools.com/download-decipher-backup-repair.html
As other people in the thread have mentioned, you can also try some third-party programs to read the backup and pull-out the important data so you at least have it in some capacity. We have one on the website I've linked above, in addition to the repair software.
I hope this helps someone who finds this thread! Dealing with iTunes backups can be really painful, and I know it's horribly depressing to wait through a restore to get the corrupted message after SEVERAL minutes.
(Note: As I mentioned, I work on the backup fixing software I linked to, so I stand to benefit, financially or otherwise, from the links I've provided.)