Hey….. so I brought it to a 3rd party repair shop, but was told it wasn’t possible for them to fix it. They recommended an online service called Firebird, but from what I can tell, seems like that costs over 60,000 yen. I can’t go a single day without a phone, all my students are online, so I’m likely gonna just get a new phone today. But I NEED my pictures from the old phone… my pet that passed away, all my wedding photos, etc…. Can anyone recommend a service that they’ve had success with? I don’t care about the phone itself, just getting the pictures. I’m going crazy here… stupid how the loss of this device is like the loss of a limb. I’m in Nara, Oji area, if that helps anyone. Help…
19 comments
If you have an iCloud account your photos might be saved there.
If it’s important to your work, I’d focus on the new phone first—get your pics settled later.
Did they explain why they can’t repair it? What kind of damage is it?
Generally speaking, any smartphone repair shop can backup your stuff for you. Toilet water isn’t that bad (compared to a swimming pool) meaning they can probably just replace the screen but the phone itself will be messed up. Assuming the charging port isn’t damaged and your phone can hold a charge you’ll be able to plug it into your PC and copy all the photos off of it but your screen will be flickering. If you damaged the motherboard then you’re in much better trouble. Even then, a repair shop should be able to do this for you (although it could cost you well over 20000 yen).
What iphone? Everything 7 and up is supposed to be some amount of water resistant.
Aren’t the iPhone 7s and later basically waterproof (1m+ for 30 minutes)?
Not really sure what you can do, but moving forward always backup your phone to another device/drive if you’re not paying for cloud storage.
After you get a new phone, the second thing you should do (after making whatever account you have to make to activate the phone) is to setup automatic backups to somewhere.
Always back up in cloud my man.
Lesson learned: backup any important data…
So sorry that you lost all your pictures… Hope you will be able to recover it. I had a similar experience before where I lost all data from a failed external hard drive. Since then I advocate for having at least a cloud backup, plus a physical backup if possible. For those who are not convinced, ask yourself a question: if all your photo and video memories were stored in a single location and you lost it all, how much would you be willing to pay to recover it? I bet that signing up for a backup service will cost you a fraction of that.
Idk if it actually works or applies in this scenario but have you tried putting it in a bag of uncooked rice to see if the rice can suck out the moisture enough to save it?
Guess your phones been flagged by the shops….those bran muffins man.
Jokes aside, i dropped my phone in water (not toilet) and it took a few hours for the water to seap in. Regret not backing it up within 6 months of dunk. Was an iPhone 11 too…anyhow, get in the habit of backing up.
Put it in a bag of rice and in a dry space then leave it for a few days. If you manage to power it back on then back it up to a laptop immediately. If it doesn’t look like it’s powered on then try plug it in regardless and see if you can back it up.
Call Apple and see what they say. A 3rd party repair shop told me they couldn’t fix my phone and I probably needed a battery. The official Apple store in Fukuoka plugged it into their system and my phone came back to life, without a new battery. Also 2 certified apple repair shops give me a different reason one of my older phones had stopped working. Try Apple.
Pack it in dry rice for a few hours or a day or days. Or wrap it in paper towels…with some dessicant if you got it.. If it was working for a time after the dunk, it might come back. Just got to get that moisture out maybe.
Also, shake the hell out of it, but don’t bang it on anything.
And you could turn a fan on it. Warm, but not hot, air is better.
If the battery completely died that is a problem in and off itself. Keep trying to charge it. But let it charge. Don’t tinker with it after 5 to 10 minutes. Charge it for hours.
Anyway, this story is so common that all phones should be made waterproof by law. Absolutely silly that they aren’t.
Did u go to apple store? U rlly should try that option first before going to 3rd party
Its an iPhone. Pay Apple another $60000 and be happy you had the opportunity to give to them again. Shit you should give them a tip on top for the hassle.
Any service that deals with electronics as small as the ones in a smartphone is going to charge big money for any kind of repair. However in your case, you might not need any special repairs.
In my experience, water usually only damages the screen, so replacing it and cleaning up the connectors might bring your phone back to life. Considering your screen was already cracked, to me that’s the most likely scenario. You might even get lucky just by opening the phone and properly drying it. I’ve restored a couple of phones this way.
Water damage is usually not that bad because the phone internals are well protected; it’s mostly just the connectors that get screwed. All you might need is a good clean up (with alcohol ) that any medium size repair shop should be able to do, or even you could do it.
PM me if you’d like me to give it a try.
Good luck.
Same thing happened a few years back but a local repair shop was able to fix my iPhone 6. I’d get a 2nd opinion.
I haven’t used them but there’s a big repair chain called [Smartphone Repair King](https://flash-agt.com/) (スマホ修理王) that may be able to do board-level data recovery. They have branches in Osaka, though they’ll likely send out the actual repair to a central facility.
I don’t know if they will be any cheaper than Firebird (it will many 万円 regardless) but worth contacting them at least.
With data recovery service usually you only pay the full amount if they’re successful.