Data recovery after failed update

RKipfer wrote:

the only data I had was on my phone with no backup

No backup, no recovery. If the data existed only on your phone, and not anywhere else (wasn't synchronized to iCloud, backed up to iCloud, backed up to your computer, etc.), the data is gone.

The AI says the Apple store can do a deep data search and recover my data. Now I am 100 miles from the nearest apple store and in the past they never have enough staff and they need to add a hotel so you can sleep there while you wait hours to talk to anyone. Can Apple get my photos off my phone or anything else or is it a total waste of time?

You can call the Apple Store if you like, but I think the AI is leading you down a rabbit hole. Spend the money and time for the trip, and you won't get your data back. You'll just have an expensive lesson in not blindly trusting any and all output generated by an AI program …

RKipfer wrote:

I was running IOS 26.7 on my iphone SE 3rd generation and it showed an update was available to IOS27, so I put it on the charging stand and let it go. In the morning I hit the home button and nothing happened. I puched the power button and the apple symbol came up and under it it said to continue holding the power button to restore. This went on for a few times and I discussed it with an AI and it told me to install itunes on my computer and hook up the phone and it would restore it and keep my data. Itunes installed a whole new IOS and now wants to know whare to get my data from so I didn't finish the setup since the only data I had was on my phone with no backup. The AI says the Apple store can do a deep data search and recover my data. Now I am 100 miles from the nearest apple store and in the past they never have enough staff and they need to add a hotel so you can sleep there while you wait hours to talk to anyone. Can Apple get my photos off my phone or anything else or is it a total waste of time?

AI is often wrong. The sad reality is if you weren't backing up the data on your phone before something went wrong, there is nowhere to get the data back from. Backups MUST happen before something goes wrong. This is an unfortunate lesson you're going to learn from this.

The AI says the Apple store can do a deep data search and recover my data

Nope, AI is making stuff up. That's not unusual.

Hopefully you are not saying that the data on your iPhone was not important enough to you to back up your iPhone?

If you want to take the phone in to the Apple Store.......you need to make an appointment......so you don't have to wait for hours, and maybe days.

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

Are you sure you are not sync'd with iCloud for photos? If you choose not to recover from a backup you may find a lot of data will sync with iCloud once signed it.

Sync is on by default, however if you turned off iCloud sync then you have no remedy. No deep search exists except from iCloud.