Expert disputes Apple on data recovery from water-damaged iPhones

st. John's Newfoundland is the home of Josephine and Dave billard they are avid world travelers last year the couple was able to take the trip of a lifetime spending five months on a voyage from Greece through Europe and finishing in Norway occasionally posting a few photos to Facebook Norway and look at that the fjords Santorini but the billards never got around to backing up the rest of the thousands of images they took with their iPhone when they got back to Newfoundland last summer and went for a canoe ride on this pond near their property disaster struck I didn't hit dead center slightly off-centre was centered that way and then we both corrected the wrong way and over we went so we flipped the canoe oh the phone went in the pond and went right to the bottom I would say we were in four or five feet of water it was amazing how your mind flicks automatically - oh my gosh she's my dad at my phone yeah there were lots of pictures in a panic Josephine contacted Apple and asked what could be done to recover her thousands of precious photos we were shocked surprised at the course of the iPhone people then Apple can't help you know that didn't appeared to have known they had that virtually had no interest really in India they'd like to sell you a new phone right away but they don't do that they don't really care so much about the data and we were more concerned about today that [Music] Josephine visited other small repair shops in st. John's but no one was able to help her finally she visited this small company that gave her the name of an expert 3,000 kilometres away near Rochester New York I was very doubtful but I tried to have hope that we would get them back but I was in my heart I really didn't think I would ever see those photos other than in my mind's eye truthfully this is Honeoye Falls New York 30 kilometres outside of Rochester the home of iPad rehab small business run by Jesse Jones many of her customers are surprised to discover that Jessa holds a molecular biology PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine she studied human genetics when she moved here and started a family she somehow started fixing iPads and iPhones now I apply the same sort of analytical reasoning skills and working with things that are really really small that have no user manual so now I try to fix iPhones figure out how they work and how to get them to turn back on when they stop working you might wonder how a molecular biologist ended up in this line of work Jessa and her husband Jeff have four children including twins one day Jessa was missing her cellphone at home and discovered that the kids were playing with it and somehow dropped it into the toilet I tried to plunge it out tried to auger it out hey Google how do you how do you take a toilet out of the house time to get her eat it out yeah put it in the front yard one baby two babies then I got a sledgehammer and I fledged hammered it look at that there was my iPhone Jones sacrificed her $100 toilet for a phone that cost several times that amount then she went on the internet and taught herself how to repair iPhones she studied electronics and micro sauntering and eventually figured out how to repair her phone once she figured that out she started passing on her skills to others stay-at-home moms in her neighborhood and realized there was a business opportunity here I think that women in general are very good at repair you know they they tend to have the sort of you know kind of ability to be very to be very gentle and yet at times apply enough pressure to get things to move around there there appropriately cautious but also aggressive and some of those are kind of skills that you develop being a mom when the billards water damaged iphone arrived from Newfoundland it presented a challenge we recorded as Jessa called them on FaceTime to share some news you sent me a phone that's been driving me crazy since August yes I can imagine because I can tell that your trip looks amazing all your pictures all recovered and there were thousands of them those are the best moments of my job it turns out that the advice the billards got from Apple about how their pictures were not recoverable is not at all unusual the most common answer and I hear this from customers all the time is there is no way to get your pictures from your iPhone if it won't turn on it's it's heartbreaking it's absolutely heartbreaking because it is absolutely not true most toilet phones you know common family water accidents most of those are recoverable in your experience what percentage of phones in that condition can be recovered ninety five percent really all right there we go do we have time and she is so sure she charges $300 only if she can get the data back skated by on that one Apple makes a show of helping people with trouble shooting their devices the company runs this online community forum that coaches people to try a restart and not much else they allow people like Jessa to offer advice to customers but whenever Jessa tells people online that their devices can actually be easily repaired by someone other than Apple her advice is quickly removed from the online forum and then she receives this notice your account is currently banned it felt incredibly unfair given how how hard I tried to to follow the rules I've read the Terms of Use I have followed the Terms of Use you know to the to the best of my ability and then this is the this is the result they don't want people to know they don't want people to try to fix their phone to recover the data they don't care they blame you it's your fault we double-checked Jessa's claims by contacting the Apple forum ourselves when we asked what we could do to recover photos from a water damaged phone the answer was nothing they're gone there is no way to recover any data that was on it including the photos that was not already backed up we wrote again to ask if we should try Jess's data recovery service the answer was not unless you have money to burn they can't recover your photos no one can the data is gone we also contacted the official site for Apple support and got a similar answer as the photos weren't backed up unfortunately there is no way to recover them when we asked Apple about why they provided false information they chose not to respond to find out everything from Jessica Jones says she loves the design of Apple products but just wishes the company would adjust its corporate culture everything that Apple does kind of goes with that same mindset if you think of them as you know the kind of kid in school that that that says you know hey don't you can borrow my crayons but don't bear down it's kind of the bossy controlling you know hover mother and and everything they do is just sort of with that attitude I'd like for somebody to just smack them and say you're not the boss of me for the national I'm Terence Mckenna and Honeoye Falls New York now if you want to know more about the technical details of how Jessa Jones was able to get that data off the water-damaged phone we have this extra video on our YouTube channel where she explains all of it check it out and while you're there you can subscribe youtube.com slash CPC at the National

Channel: CBC News: The National

Views: 110,171

Keywords: Right to Repair, iPhone, Apple, iPhone replair, Data recovery, iphone water damage, Iphone repair, apple repair, iPad Rehab, Jessa Jones, Water-damaged phone, water damaged phone repair, fix wet iphone, Iphone 6, Iphone 8, iphone xr, iPad repair, terence mckenna, CBC, CBC News, The National

Id: K98JYRBGyrg

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Jessa_iPadRehab]

I can't believe that Apple is STILL DELETING posts on the official Apple Support forum regarding options for data recovery for water damaged iPhones. Two of my answers were deleted this morning, so I did a started a livestream and you can see Apple deleting reasonable answer. They have the right to censor their forum, but the gotta OWN IT if they are going to do it.
https://youtu.be/N8n13l-idWg

[u/Kyle292]

She hit that toilet with the dog right there lmao

[u/[deleted]]

They are using internet explorer!

[u/cidavid]

If my phone screen is basically smashed and my home button also, is it possible to retrieve the data from it? I have years worth of photos on that old phone and my dad passed away shortly after it damaged. I hold onto hope that I can get it back someday.

[u/La_Lanterne_Rouge]

One thing I am certain about is that my next phone will not be made or sold by Apple.

[u/similar_observation]

If you've never seen one of these repairs, check out Louis Rossmann. It's pretty neat to watch and Lou can get pretty snarky at times.

[u/darkklown]

Why the hell do people keep buying Apple products. They are overpriced crap and the support is terrible. What is it that people think they are buying? Do they think they are special because they buy a iphone like everyone else?

[u/Jessa_iPadRehab]

This is why this story is important. Heartbreaking. https://imgur.com/0IXgkNr

[u/Creativation]

/u/Jessa_iPadRehab in this repair story and Apple's censorship of the truth you are the blonde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axSnW-ygU5g