We have not seen any consumer-grade tool that can download your passwords or messages (SMS and iMessage history) because end-to-end encryption. This may include backups (although we are yet to see a tool that can do that reliably, let alone free of charge) and some synchronized data (which may include your photos if you enabled the iCloud Photos setting in your iPhone). The data recovery tool can try downloading (thus “recovering”) information from your iCloud account. What the tool does: Interestingly, the claim is not necessarily a lie. While a specialized data recovery lab could try temporarily reviving the water-damaged iPhone for the time they need to copy your data off the device (and charge you an arm and a leg for just trying), no end-user software (and definitely no free software) can do that. User expectations: The bold claim makes me think that the tool can somehow magically extract information from a sunk device that cannot be powered on. Let’s first deal with the “water damaged” claim, as in “the device doesn’t power on”. The company makes a bold statement, claiming that its tool can “Recover data lost due to water damaged, broken, deletion, device loss, etc.” (original spelling preserved). When researching the various data iOS recovery tools, I was baffled by the very ambitious claim made by one data recovery company (you’ll easily find it if you look). Let us place the claims through our usual scrutiny.

Do any of those tools actually work, and do they live up to the user’s expectations? The answer is complex, hence this article.

These tools’ claims range from “Recover data lost due to water damaged, broken, deletion, device loss, etc.” to the much more reserved “Selectively recovers iPhone data from internal memory, iCloud, and iTunes”. There is no lack of tools claiming the ability to recover lost or deleted information from the iPhone.

Extract data from iphone backup