itunes offered to update iphone, now all data lost on iphone

[GomJabbar]

My daughter has an iphone. itunes offered to update the programs on her iphone today, so she did.

At the end of the update process, a dialog came up saying that the phone was being restored. She panicked thinking that restore means restore to original factory state and she undocked her iphone at this point.

Now she has lost all her contacts, images, sms messages, etc. She said she has not made any backups. Anyone know of a way to restore her iphone or recover the files that were erased?

Personally I do not use an iphone or use itunes, so I really don't know much about either.

[Stargate199]

If you told itunes to sync contacts and pictures to your computer, then the next sync will restore them. As for SMS, if they are saved to the SIM, they are still there, if not they are gone.

If it was a firmware update, you just leave it alone until it says OK to disconnect. It will say restoring iPhone because it is reinstalling the OS on the phone, but the data is all there.

If itunes was not set to sync all of the data on the phone, then it is all lost. I know you can save phone #'s to the SIM but don't know if the iPhone can access it. If she has all of her contacts with numbers in Outlook or Mail (OS X), the set the iPhone to overwrite all data with data stored on the computer and it should all be there.

[NorrisCell]

An old backup file is probably the only hope. Very few phones save messages to the sim anymore, as it has a limit of 30. There is an outside chance that iTunes stored a usable backup file on the hard drive like the Blackberry software does during an update. If so, you may be able to restore from that.