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A Friend of mine took his ipad to an apple shop to get it upgraded, it was about 3 years old and never upgraded before that. I think he must have missed 2 or 3 versions in that time.
The Apple store installed the latest ios version but all his photos are gone, everything else too, they returned it to factory. Ive used photorec a number of times on memory cards but have no idea how to access an ipad raw disk and if it is/was encrypted?
What I understand for the standard dd command accessing /dev/rdisk0 or whatever on an iphone is that it must be decrypting the data? If the latest versions are encrypted have they always been encrypted? Is there a device file that can be scanned? What about DFU mode can the physical disk be scanned through that? If the previous version was encrypted I understand that the key is probably different to the new version and there is no hope,
I know little about Apple products and dont want to I am more of a Android/Linux/Unix person, but I to help this guy, he is elderly and pretty gutted about losing photos that cannot be replaced.

Besides recovery, it's also capable of restoring photos from iTunes backup or iCloud. There are already GUI programs that achieve the same purpose as described above. However if you insisit on using Photorec, than best ask the developer to help you out.

It is inevitable to fail to upgrade your iOS devices. When that happen, you may lost all your data. So before updating you need backup your iPhone data to computer.
However you can recover lost iPhone Data after Upgrading to iOS 8

As far as I know there is no way to get deleted IOS data back after ios ipgrade.But you can google some tool to restore lost ios data,I konw many tool can solve this problem.Like :iStonsoft,Coolmuster,Vibosoft etc.
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How to regain lost data from ipad after ios upgrade