Thank You, Codex: I Recovered 10-Year-Old Encrypted Photos in Two Prompts

I did this about a week ago, but I really wanted to share it with the sub because it’s not the most obvious Codex use case, and maybe it helps people think a bit more broadly about what it can do.

Around 10 years ago, I lost my iPhone. Young and reckless me had never backed it up to iCloud. The only backup I had was on an old Windows laptop, but by then the laptop was already cooked. All I had left was an SSD backup from that machine.

Somewhere on that SSD was the old iTunes folder, from back when iPhone backups were handled through iTunes. For 10 years, I tried to get those photos back. I downloaded countless recovery programs, followed random blog posts, dug through folders manually, and tried different methods across both Windows and Mac. Nothing worked. I could see pieces of the backup, but I could never actually get to the pictures.

Then last week I had a lightbulb moment: connect the SSD to my laptop and let Codex figure it out. I thought it was a long shot at the time, but if someone could, that is Codex.

Within minutes, Codex found the relevant files and prompted me with a popup asking for possible passwords I might have used at the time.

BAM.

Two prompts later, I had recovered 12 GB of photos and files that I thought were gone forever.

I was, and still am, completely baffled. So thank you, Codex, for recovering a piece of my past.