Keep iphone app data and settings when jailbreaking

[danwms]

Please can someone confirm my understandings on this.

Last time i did the jailbreak process and then restored to normal i lost all of my previous third party app data, sms messages etc. i have read that the iphone backup does contain all of this but itunes only keeps one copy of this and so when you sync the jailbroken iphone it will overwrite your backup.

Would this work?

Backup the un-jailbroken iphone with all the apps, data and messages etc then take a copy of the backup file it creates and save it elsewhere as an image of the working iphone that i can always return to.

If i then jailbreak the phone and want to restore, I can then overwrite the latest backup file with this one and then do a restore taking me back to my normal iphone setup.

A couple of questions.

When the iphone has been jailbroken, is there a way i can use this backup to copy across all of my app data etc to the jail broken phone?

Can i take a copy of the backup taken from a jailbroken phone to use as an image to always go back to containing the jailbroken apps?

Basically, the main reason why i don't want to jail break is because i will lose all of the data held within all the individual apps e.g. game saves, map bookmarks, logon details etc.


hope someone can help

 

[LSUtigers03]

iTunes keeps multiple backups of your iPhone. I have backups going back to last year. I also have backups from other peoples phones that I jailbroke. If you lost your data its because you set the phone up as a new phone. A few days ago the safari downloader wasn't working so I restored the phone. I made a backup and restored a fresh copy of 3.0. Then I just synced my newest backup instead of setting up a new phone and after I jailbroke again all my game saves, sms messages, ect. were all still there. There's no reason to pull out the backup file and save it somewhere else.

 

[danwms]

i thought you had to restore the phone before doing the jailbreak.

Does this not mean you will lose all your settings?

 

[LSUtigers03]

i thought you had to restore the phone before doing the jailbreak.

Does this not mean you will lose all your settings?

You don't have to restore if you don't want to. You can just use redsnow without restoring. Redsnow won't remove any of your settings.