How To Save SHSH Blobs For iOS 5.1.1 On iPhone, iPad And iPod Touch

With the Untethered Jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 now available to all iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users, millions are now taking advantage of it so that they enjoy all the enhancements, tweaks, themes, and apps that the jailbreak community has to offer.  It’s so easy to use the jailbreak and even easier to enjoy the iOS experience with all the jailbreak add-ons and tweaks.  But the reality is that once Apple releases an update to their iOS, the jailbreak itself will be blocked again until a new one is developed.

Of course, once a firmware update is available, the best advice for jailbreak users is to avoid it completely until a jailbreak solution is made for it.  Of course, there are many who will not be aware of this and update anyway.  For hardcore users, they will want to use the next update just to see what its like.  But what happens when they want to jailbreak their iDevices again?  This means that they will need to downgrade from the update to a lesser firmware that can be jailbroken.  And this is where it can get tricky.

Downgrading your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch is not as easy as just getting a previous firmware and restoring to it.  There are requirements to make this possible.  One of these requirements is to save your SHSH Blobs on Cydia.  This is a very important step.  In fact, it is highly recommended to save your SHSH Blobs on Cydia as soon as you jailbreak your iDevice.  That way, you will be able to downgrade to the current firmware you are on in the future.  In this case, you will need to save the SHSH Blobs for iOS 5.1.1 because once iOS 5.1.2 or iOS 6 hits the market, you might update accidentally or you might want to try out the new features.  And when you find yourself wanting to downgrade, you will be able to do so.

What are SHSH Blobs?

Before you do this, you will need to understand what SHSH Blobs are.  Basically, the blobs are like a signature of your device.  They actually exist because of Apple and are used to control the manual software downgrade of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.  These blobs are unique to each device that is out there which means that your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad has unique blobs that you need to save for future use.

How do I save them?

The good news is that there is an easy way to save your SHSH Blobs.  You can save SHSH Blobs for both jailbroken and non-jailbroken devices.  If you want to jailbreak your iDevice and save your SHSH blobs, sign up with us here and we will provide you all of the tools and tutorials that you need to make it happen.

For jailbroken devices:

If you already have your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad jailbroken on iOS 5.1.1, then just do the following:

• Open Cydia and see if Cydia has saved your iOS 5.1.1 SHSH Blobs.
• Open Cydia and tap on the Cydia tab on the bottom left.
• At the top of the home page of Cydia, you should see “SHSH” followed by a sequence of firmware versions.  These are the blobs that Cydia has saved for your device.
• Make sure that you see iOS 5.1.1 listed there.  If not, close Cydia and re-open it.  Cydia should automatically save your iOS 5.1.1 blobs and you should see the firmware you are currently on displayed at the top of the home page.

For non-jailbroken devices:

This can be a little trickier but it is not that difficult at all to do.  You can even use this method on your jailbroken iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad just to make sure that you have your SHSH Blobs saved.  What you will need is software called TinyUmbrella and this can be found with a simple Google search.  TinyUmbrella fetches the SHSH blobs from Apples servers and then submits them to the Cydia servers.  The SHSH Blobs on non-jailbroken devices are saved locally on your computer.

• Once you have downloaded TinyUmbrella, run the program.
• Connect your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to your computer.  TinyUmbrella will then detect your device.
• Make sure your iTunes program is closed.
• In the top right corner of the TinyUmbrella window, you will see the button Save SHSH.  Click on it.

TinyUmbrella will save the SHSH Blobs of the latest firmware and any older ones that you have on Cydia server.  You can find the SHSH file directory in the Advanced Tab on TinyUmbrella.  If you are jailbroken,you will also see the blobs listed.

Downgrading your iDevice:

Once you have your SHSH Blobs saved, you will want to make use of them to downgrade your iDevice in the future.  For example, if you are on iOS 6 on the future, and you want to downgrade back to iOS 5.1.1 so you can jailbreak again.  To do the downgrade:

• Plug in your iDevice into your computer.
• Launch TinyUmbrella.
• Once your device is detected, click on the button Start TSS Server.
• Once TSS Server is enabled, launch iTunes.
• On iTunes, click on your iDevice and hold down the Shift Key (Windows) or Alt Key (Mac) and click on Restore button.
• Select the firmware that you wish to restore to.  In this case, it will be iOS 5.1.1.
• Your iDevice will then start to be restored to the previous firmware that you want to downgrade to.
• Once it has finished, you will see error 1015.  This is normal.  When you see this error, go back to TinyUmbrella and then click on Exit Recovery Mode.  Your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad will reboot and function normally.

Keep in mind that you can only downgrade to the firmware that you have saved SHSH Blobs for so make sure that you have saved SHSH Blobs today!  Let us know your experience with this in the comments, folks!