iTunes/iPhone Restore problem

[whoathere]

I have a feeling there will be a way to solve this, but I’m calling in the experts on this one.

I get a frantic call from my brother this morning. He and his wife planned to get new iPhones today, so last night they backed their phones up to iTunes. However, his wife accidentally backed her phone up as “Chad’s iPhone” and then he accidentally restored “Chad’s iPhone” instead of backing up. So, he ended up restoring his wife’s phone to his phone.

In attempting to fix this, he restored his phone to factory settings and tried to restore from iCloud, but said there is nothing there to restore from.

My question is, because they aren’t actively backing their phones up, is there a way to look at older “Chad’s iPhone” backups in iTunes? Ones that may be years old, and try to restore that? He’s most interested in recovering contacts.

 

[Weaselboy]

If you open iTunes and look in preferences in the Devices tab you can see what devices backed up there. If the older backups were named something different, they may still be there.

 

[mikzn]

If you did not manually archive the back ups most likely it's just the most recent back up over written over previous ones unless they were named differently.

It is possible the contacts are still in the iCloud account if the phone was not synchronized with iCloud yet - this is easy to check by logging into www.icloud.com and check to see if the contacts are still there?

 

[whoathere]

I’ve got a little more info now.

The accidentally backing up to “Chad’s iPhone” happened several years ago. So every old backup is also of his wife’s phone.

We don’t know what happened to iCloud. It’s completely blank. But, like most people, he remembers getting the errors for a long time saying his space was full and needed to get more. No notes, contacts, photos, nothing in iCloud.
[doublepost=1528049171][/doublepost]I’ve even thought about trying to get them from verizon somehow. He didn’t have Verizon Cloud, but I remember using backup assistant years ago and having an old transfer show up as an option to load into my new phone.

Any ideas on accessing the iPhone the as a drive and getting anything that way?