My daughter was having problems with her iPhone. It was showing the USB cord with an arrow pointing to the iTunes symbol. Hmm ... [Googly-oo oogly ...]
Ok, recovery mode. What were you doing? An iOS upgrade? And the battery died in the middle? Let's try a shutdown ... Nope, looks like we're going to have to do a factory reset. Have you ever backed up? No, of course not.
Let's see if there are any tools to grab your stuff before restoring. Yup, here's two, for $49 or $59. Great. Let's try the cheaper one first. Ok, it wants me to restore first then it will let me scan.
Now the other one. This one says it can't scan while it's in recovery mode ... but asks if it should reset it to normal mode to scan first. Why sure, that would be great.
And guess what? Phone cones back up fine. SWEET! Then I spent the next half-hour setting backup/sync settings and showing her how to do backups.
I rule.