Lost contacts and photos during a backup. Can I retrieve them without a new backup?

Question

I plugged in my husband's phone to add music and it made me update iTunes before doing so. I did and it restored my husband's phone to an old backup from a while ago. He lost all his new contacts and photos, which include our daughter's birth that was this week. I'm so mad right now. Is there any way to recover these without a current backup?

Answer 1

If you had an IMAP mail account then all your emails are stored on the server, so install Thunderbird and create the IMAP mail account to see folders and emails on the server.
If you had a POP mail account then all of your emails were stored on the computer and you should have been creating regular backups of your Profile folder or at least created a backup of your Profile (and any other documents / images etc on your computer ) before wiping the computer/reformatting and reinstalling OS. So you can use the backup to reinstall the Profile. If you used MozBackup tool to create the *.psv file, then reinstall MozBacktool and use it to restore the Profile.
* Backup: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup
If you did not create a backup of the Profile, but backed up/saved emails as .eml files saved to an external device, then you could use this addon to put those .eml files back into the new Profile.
* https://freeshell.de//~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html