10/01/2026
This was an interesting data recovery because the customer specifically needed their TikTok drafts recovered.
The phone had severe liquid damage after being dropped into a pool with the back glass already broken. They tried to fish it out without getting into the pool, so it spent quite a bit of time submerged. Upon opening it, we could see just how bad the liquid damage was—the phone had even started growing mold inside.
Luckily, the water damage was isolated mainly to the top portion of the logic board, and no liquid was found inside the board layers aside from moisture between the interposer.
After removing the shields from the top board, we found extensive corrosion around several components. The display PMIC was heavily liquid damaged with a massive amount of corrosion underneath it. The flash IC, audio IC, and NFC IC areas were also affected.
After clearing a capacitor short, cleaning up the corrosion, and replacing the display PMIC, we had a bootable phone again.
The phone was also extremely close to full capacity, so we first backed up the customer’s photos and videos directly. Once those were safely backed up, we deleted them from the phone to free up enough storage space to begin moving the locally stored TikTok drafts into the iPhone’s camera roll.
Once all of the TikTok drafts are safely saved to the phone, we’ll perform a full iTunes backup to preserve the rest of the customer’s data.
Another successful board-level data recovery, and most importantly, we were able to recover the data the customer thought they might never see again.
