How to properly erase an iPhone

The snapshots are not stored in a non-accessible area - everything has to be stored in the music partition since a non-jailbroken phone has no write access to the applications/system partition.

The problem is the refurb process isn't doing the basics to erase the phone.

does anyone remember when apple announced the iPhone 2.0 firmware they said that it would include a way to remote wipe the phone's memory. Wonder if that does a true "wipe" or simply erases the OS partition not allowing access to the phones "media" partition until the phone is restored?

This probably helps, but I'm doubtful it's thorough. If you ask me the biggest problem here is that Apple isn't even doing anything to thoroughly wipe refurbished models. Say you take your phone in because of a problem, and they decide to swap it right there, or tell you it needs to be sent in for repairs (at which point it could end up getting swapped, who knows)... There's no real opportunity to do anything yourself. Unless you totally wipe the thing before you go in, which could make it tough to demonstrate the problem you're having.

As I understand it, what's being recovered is an image which is a snapshot that the phone takes when you close the application (going back to the home screen) so it can do the 'zoom' animation. I suspect these may be stored in a non-user-accessible area of memory, and that's why they're still in there after a refurb (which should include a full wipe of user-accessible memory).

I was expecting some sort of utility or terminal command to a jailbroken phone - something innovative - that would do this. Their solution is rather remedial.

Now if I could just get it near the MRI and not break the machine.

That isn't exactly erasing the phone, even if you deselect syncing contacts and callenders and what not.. itunes will still go through the initial restore process which adds your account info to the phone. Unless we are certain that the next persons info will overwrite yours it doesn't exactly solve the problem at hand.. just makes it less likely.