When we use Apple’s popular iPhones, one thing we have to know is that we cannot downgrade to older version after we have upgraded the iPhone’s firmware to the latest version. This is especially true for iPhone 3GS and above and it makes iPhone users unhappy.If we want to downgrade (or restore) to older firmware version after we have upgraded the iOS to newer version for any reason, we must jailbreak (unlock) the iPhone and we must submit iPhone signatures to jailbreak server in anyway. Then, we have to make some tricks so that iTune will connect to that custom server instead of Apple’s server while we are restoring iPhone firmware. Anyway, to upload SHSH blobs of your iPhone to jailbreak server such as Cydia server, you have to jailbreak your iPhone’s OS. You must also upload your SHSH signatures to that server BEFORE you upgrade your firmware if you want to go back to older version later. That is very important for iPhone users. If you did not upload and save you SHSH signatures to jailbreak server before you upgrade to newer iOS version, you cannot restore to older OS version.
However, we can save your SHSH blobs to our local hard disk and there is a way to restore to older iOS version without jailbreaking or uploading to Cydia server. You can easily do it locally for your iPhone, iPod Touch.
That small program called TinyUmbrella can help you for that purpose. It is a very good and user friendly program to extract and save iPhone/iPod Touch’s SHSH signatures onto hard disk. It can also upload your SHSH blobs to Cydia server for you. You can easily search and download the latest version of TinyUmbrella on Internet. It comes in both Windows and Mac OS X versions.
After you have downloaded TinyUmbrella, you just need to connect your iPhone and run that application. It can automatically detect the device’s ECID (Exclusive Chip ID). All you need to do is select the correct Device/Version for your device and firmware (OS) and click on Save My SHSH button. The program will save your devices SHSH signatures into hidden folder called shsh under
For example, if your login user name is AAA, the device’s SHSH files will be AAA\shsh. Note that that shsh folder is a hidden folder. You can then copy the SHSH files from that folder to other safe place for future use.
If you want to restore your iPhone/iPod Touch OS to older version in future, all you need to do is start TinyUmbrella and click on Start TSS Server button. The program will start the fake server for iTune and therefore iTune will check only that TinyUmbrealla’s server while you are restoring your iOS to older version. For me, I found that it is very easy to save SHSH and use TSS server of TinyUmbrealla to restore to older iOS versions. We don’t need to jailbreak and we can even save device’s SHSH files locally.
The important thing to note is that we must save device’s SHSH blobs before we upgrade to newer OS version.
