Answers...

to commonly asked questions.

mac mini hd crash

Scotty:
My wife has an iPhone whose display quit working. Sunday I tried backing up
and restoring using iTunes but that didn't help. Today the Apple store
replaced it with a new one and told me to go home and download everything
that had been on her old phone that was backed up in iTunes. Somehow I
screwed that up and I think deleted everything that was backed up; the new
phone has her old apps and some music but no contacts, speed dial settings,
emails etc.
Fortunately I have Time Machine but I am very unsure as to how to find and
restore the lost data from her old phone. Can you help? This is urgent as
she desperately needs this stuff for her work at the Museum.
Many thanks,
---------------

Ok, this may be a long shot but here goes...

First go into time machine and find the older files in the following location:

~/users/youruser/library/applicationsupport/mobilesync/backup

Now restore that folder from the previous date.
Next, connect your iphone and choose to restore your phone. After the restore you should have the choice to restore a backup. Hopefully (big hopefully) itunes will detect the older backup folder and only think it’s the current one. You could also just right click on the iphone icon in itunes to restore from backup as well instead of restoring first.

To restore apps that may have been lost, you can use time machine to recover lost apps from the following folder:
~/users/youruser/music/itunes/mobileapplications

Good luck

more info here:
iPhone and iPod touch: About backups
This image is a theme.plist hack