Kroll Ontrack improves Apple mobile device data recovery success by 60 per cent

Consumers, who use Apple’s newest mobile devices, including iPhones® and iPads®, can now recover data such as lost photos and videos that go missing during malfunctions that impact their operating systems.

Kroll Ontrack, the leading provider of data recovery and ediscovery products and services, today announced its engineers have developed a unique capability to recover data from the latest Apple mobile devices, which exhibit a logical failure leaving the device stuck in “Recovery” mode or “Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU)” mode. These failures can effectively trap encrypted data on the devices. However, Kroll Ontrack has devised a way to temporarily bypass the logical corruption to access the data using the consumer’s login information.

This new method increases the chances of recovering encrypted data on the newest iPhones and iPads by up to 60 per cent.

“Logical failures, such as OS upgrade malfunctions and corrupt software, can leave iPhone or iPad users with a device that is functional, but data that isn’t accessible,” said Phil Bridge, Managing Director, Kroll Ontrack. “Add to that Apple’s latest generations of mobile devices with encrypted user data and data recovery success was slim because direct access to the encrypted data was not an option.”

Building on its long history of delivering the most robust Mac recovery toolset in the industry, Ontrack Data Recovery engineers specifically developed the unique ability to repair the operating system to then access the data for all Apple mobile devices, including the iPhone 5S® and iPad Air®, which are hardware encrypted. This method, combined with an already extensive ability to recover from non-hardware encrypted Apple devices, significantly increases the chances of recovering photos, videos, contacts, SMS, notes, calendar and other critical mobile device content. With a diagnostic report that shows the quality of recoverable files on the Apple device, individuals benefit from knowing exactly what data will be returned to them prior to committing to the cost of the recovery. Once the recovery is complete, Kroll Ontrack provides both the raw files as well as a backup file that the individual can use to perform a full restore from iTunes to their Apple mobile device. This also provides a point in time recovery file for future use.

“Customers were coming to us for help recovering their encrypted data from their newer Apple devices because there are no commercially available solutions. We researched the issues and developed our own solution, as we often do,” added Bridge. “Our solution does not defeat or bypass the device’s encryption, but rather temporarily bypasses the logical corruption without “jail breaking” the device to access the data using the device and customer’s user access credentials.”