How to Restore an iPhone without Losing iOS 8.4 Jailbreak

If you need to restore your iPhone, but don’t want to lose your iOS 8.4 jailbreak in the process, here’s how to restore your iPhone without losing your iOS 8.4 jailbreak.

Whether you just want to start with a clean slate or you actually screwed up your iPhone by installing a weird Cydia tweak, you can restore your iPhone to factory settings while still keeping your iOS 8.4 jailbreak intact.

While doing this is perhaps less important than it was with the iOS 8.1.2 jailbreak, it’s possible that you just don’t want to have to rejailbreak your device after restoring it, and that makes perfect sense.

Read: How to Jailbreak iOS 8.4 with TaiG

Apple makes it so that when you restore your iPhone, you have to update to the latest version, so when iOS 8.1.2 was the latest version of iOS that could be jailbroken, restoring your iPhone meant you had to update to iOS 8.2 or iOS 8.3 at the time, meaning you’d lose your jailbreak and you could never go back until a new jailbreak released.

Luckily, that’s not a problem today since the latest version of iOS is jailbreakable. Because of that, you don’t need to worry about losing your jailbreak when you restore, but it’s still convenience thing, and if you want or need to restore your iPhone, it’s best to keep your jailbreak intact so that you don’t have to redo that whole process over again.

Without further ado, here’s how to restore your iPhone without losing your iOS 8.4 jailbreak.

Before You Begin

Before you start restoring your iPhone, you might be curious as to why you just can’t go into the settings and select Erase All Content and Settings. That’s normally what you would do if you wanted to start from scratch.

However, doing so on a jailbroken iPhone will result in a bootloop and you’ll need to hard-restart your iPhone, which will merely just put you back to where you started, which is why you can’t use this option. Instead, you have to restore using iTunes, but even then, if you want to keep your jailbreak intact, you’ll need to use special software.

This is where Semi-Restore comes in handy. It works in a rather unique way as well, since there’s no need to download anything to your iPhone, but rather works on your computer.

You’ll want to back up your iPhone first before you begin to restore your iPhone. We have a handy guide on how to do this. You’ll also need to install OpenSSH, which can be found in Cydia and installed just like a regular tweak.

Restoring Your iPhone Without Losing Your Jailbreak

To restore your iPhone and keep your iOS 8.4 jailbreak intact, all you need to do is download the Semi-Restore program onto your computer (only works with Windows and Linux currently) and run it with your iPhone plugged in. While it says that it supports up to iOS 8.1.2, it will work on iOS 8.4 devices without a problem.

Once Semi-Restore is downloaded to your computer, extract the .ZIP folder and two files will be extracted. One is a .DLL file and the other is an .EXE file. Double-click on the .EXE file to open up the Semi-Restore program. With your iPhone plugged in, click Restore to begin the process of restoring your iPhone while still keeping the jailbreak intact.

Let Semi-Restore do its thing and afterward your iPhone will reboot and restore to factory settings. Pick up your iPhone and go through the iOS Setup Assistant to get to the home screen. From there, you should see a freshly-restored iPhone, but the jailbreak will still be there, with the Cydia icon still on the home screen.