Tenorshare UltData 9.5.0 (macOS)

Recovering a deleted contact or a set of photos from an iPhone is a job most school IT staff don’t often do — until a staff member’s phone drops its sync and the only copy of the school trip photos is gone. Tenorshare UltData version 9.5.0 handles that task on a Mac running macOS 10.8 or later, and it speaks English, German, French, Spanish, and several other languages out of the box.

What you can recover with one pass

• Contacts, messages and call logs
• Photos and videos from the camera roll
• Notes, reminders and voice memos
• FaceTime data and voicemail
• Music and iBook content
• Data from iPhone 11, iPhone XS, iPhone 7, and earlier models back to the iPod touch 1

Recovering a set of deleted contacts

Plug the iPhone into the Mac, launch UltData, and the app scans the device automatically. The interface shows recoverable items in categories — contacts, messages, photos — so you don’t have to wade through raw file blocks. Select a few contacts and hit Recover. The tool writes them back to the phone or saves a VCF file to the desktop. The whole job takes under ten minutes on a typical iPhone XS, and the Mac doesn’t need to be online after the initial download.

Works alongside iTunes and iCloud without conflict

UltData doesn’t ask you to install extra drivers or disable security tools. It works alongside Apple’s own iTunes and iCloud without conflict — useful when a teacher has iCloud sync turned on but still needs a local copy of a deleted file. The recovered VCF contacts import straight into macOS Contacts (formerly Address Book) via a double-click, and photos land as standard JPEGs and MOV files that open in Preview or QuickTime without conversion.

If you keep a shared school Mac for device troubleshooting, UltData’s portable nature helps: install it into the Applications folder once, and it’s ready for any staff iPhone that gets plugged in. The app respects macOS permissions, so it runs under a standard user account as long as that user has read access to the phone’s volume.

Swap to a data-capable cable if iPhone isn’t recognised

• iPhone not recognised: Check the cable first — many school-issue micro-USB cables are charge-only. Swap to a data-capable cable. If the Mac still doesn’t see the phone, unlock the device and tap “Trust” when the Mac requests pairing.
• Scan finishes with zero recoverable items: This usually means the phone wasn’t in the right state. Disable “Optimise Storage” in iOS settings — that feature can overwrite deleted data faster than expected. Run the scan again immediately after deletion before the phone writes new data.
• Gatekeeper blocks launch: The installer includes a friendly workaround. Mount the disk image, launch the terminal command provided, then drag the app into Applications. The one-time bypass is documented in the readme and doesn’t require disabling macOS security permanently.
• Recovered photos are corrupted: The phone’s flash memory might have already reused the blocks. UltData can’t create data that isn’t there. For future cases, set staff expectations: recovery works best when the phone is put in aeroplane mode immediately after deletion and connected to a Mac within a few hours.

• macOS OS X 10.8 or later
• Intel 64-bit processor