Chosen Solution
I have an iPhone Xs that I regularly back up to iTunes but not iCloud. I took a ton of photos on vacation and have forgotten the passcode, and I haven’t yet backed those photos up to iTunes. The phone has also been rebooted so it’s requiring me to enter the passcode (rather than allowing me to use FaceID). The phone is “disabled for 1 minute” which suggests I have about five attempts to unlock the phone before it’s disabled. I think I could get the right password if I had many attempts (maybe 50 or so, to test various permutations of common password schemes I use). But from reading online, it looks like after ten attempts the phone will be permanently disabled, and I’ll need to do a restore from iTunes in order to re-enable the phone. Unfortunately it seems that doing so would overwrite the data on my phone with the data of my most recent backup. Is this correct? If so, what’s the purpose of the iOS feature that erases all data after 10 attempts? Isn’t the data in a permanently disabled iPhone essentially unavailable by any means (except for somehow breaking the phone’s encryption, which seems practically impossible with current technology)? Or is there any other way of accessing the phone via iTunes from my computer, perhaps before it’s disabled? I know that if I put the phone in recovery mode and plug it into my computer I’ll have the option to update the phone’s software rather than recover. But will that help in any way? I also have the FaceID enabled but I think I have no way of using that until I enter a correct passcode. Any advice or creative workarounds would be greatly appreciated.
If you have face Id you can open the phone and back it up. You can restore the phone and it will wipe out the data and passcode but it cannot erase iCloud and once the phone is reset it won’t go past the iCloud password. You can retrieve your iCloud password from Apple if you can prove you are the original owner. But face Id should work. Update (07/20/2020) If you have have iCloud on your phone it gives you a certain amount of storage in the cloud for free. I believe it’s 5gb or 50gb but I can’t remember. You can check on iCloud or call customer service. And again if you can’t remember you will have to restore it and lose any of the data since your back up or if it’s more than what available on iCloud. But if you forgot your iCloud password you will have to contact Apple support to verify that you are you for them to unlock iCloud.
