I'm looking for advice/suggestions on how to retrieve the contact list from a (distant) relative's iphone. Tragically, this person died without letting the rest of the family know who their friends and associates were, and the iPhone is literally the best the family has to work with. Of course, the phone is password protected, or there would be no problem.
Is this something Apple will do if they are provided with the right documentation? Do they have a service mode for the iphone or a special cable or something?
Is this something the police are able to handle?
Finally, is this something I can do? My thought is to use iTunes to create a backup of the phone, then dive into the backup using strings. Once I locate some promising strings, I would use a hexeditor to find the offset, and look for plaintext contact information.
Any thoughts or references are much appreciated. Thanks, HN!
An article that talks about it: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/ubuntu-lucid-lynx-1004-ca...
It doesn't specifically mention contact data, but it's probably stored in some unencrypted database which should be easy to look up if you can get in. IIRC, the stock Apple messaging app was back-ended with SQLLite so you might just be in luck!
EDIT: In fact, I'm going to try this on my iPod Touch (3rd Gen) when I get home. I'll let you know how I get on :)