Recovering media from iPhone 3Gs
NOTE: the following is a correct procedure to access the disk image, but I was unable to recover any media from before the factory reset. I’m not sure whether this is due to a deletion/erasure technicality with Apple’s implementation of flash storage media, the fuse filesystem, etc.
The AT&T store factory reset our iPhone 3Gs, and all the photos, etc. were deleted. Unfortunately, iTunes had not been syncing any of the photos since Dec. 2009! So, we had to run a recovery operation.
You can readily find tutorials for jailbreaking & downloading the disk image of an iPhone. Once you have the disk image, you can use photorec, part of the testdisk suite, to recover photos, etc. from the disk image… assuming they resided in areas of the filesystem which were never overwritten… just deleted.
A key command, which is often cited for other phones, and not the 3Gs, is:
dd if=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4096KB | ssh -C YourRemoteUserName@Your.Remote.IP.Address 'dd of=iphone-dump.img' bs=4096KB