We get a lot of enquiries from people with iPhones displaying Error Code 14. If you are one of these people then you’re probably wanting to find a way of recovering the files and data from your phone, without performing a Factory Reset and wiping its contents.
iPhone Error 14 – How does this happen?
Before the fatal error 14 code is issued, the iPhone will notify you that it is getting very short on memory. The “Storage Almost Full” message that you see is really prompting you to free up some space on the iPhone by deleting some of the data on it. This could be Apps that are no longer used or maybe a few photos or videos: anything that frees up some space on the phone.
If you follow this instruction the “Storage Almost Full” message will disappear and you’ll be able to carry on as normal. The problems come when you don’t do anything about freeing up some space on the iPhone. That space, which was already critically small just gets even smaller until eventually the phone will fall over as it’s run out of space to function.
Once this happens the iPhone will most probably enter a continuous boot loop. If you connect the iPhone to iTunes and try to restore the phone you’ll see the Error 14 code.
What can be done to recover the data from an iPhone with Error Code 14?
If you Google the error code you’ll see a lot of advice from Apple and others about changing the USB cable or updating software etc. You can and certainly should give that a go. But in our experience, once the phone is displaying error 14 it’s not possible to recover the data from it. There is simply no space on the phone to allow it to function normally, and there is no workaround. The only choice you have is to factory reset the phone, which will lose the data on it. Hopefully you’ll have enabled iCloud to store a backup of your data, but if you haven’t your data is lost.
> Links
- Our main iPhone data recovery page
- Our main phone data recovery page