iPhone Backups
This article is part 4 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.
I’m an iPhone developer, and I enjoy working with the platform. My first iPhone, however, was faulty: it would occasionally lock up and wouldn’t reboot for hours. Fortunately Apple gave me a replacement with no hassles, but during this time I was highly concerned about data loss.
There were times when I could see I had an iPhone backup, but couldn’t restore it, or other times when the backup was corrupt. This article discusses techniques for backing up iPhone backups and getting data out of them.
iPhone vs. Time Machine
The first thing to realise about iPhone backups is Time Machine doesn’t back them up. iTunes only keeps the last backup. I’ve manually copied iTunes backups before, and iTunes will recognise multiple backups. The files are in: Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
Apple has excluded iPhone backups from Time Machine using a settings file. This TUAW article explains how to edit this plist file to force Time Machine into backing up iPhone backups. It’s a slightly technical process involving working with various tools intended for developers.
Another Solution
In part 2 of our back up series, Online Backups (and how to backup with Automator), I explained how to backup folders on your Mac with online services. It would be simple to use the Automator action or Jungle Disk to backup iPhone backups. In fact, any of the previously discussed backup techniques are easier than hacking Time Machine into behaving.
Data Extraction
Sometimes you just want to get data out of the backups. I lost a lot of notes and bookmarks back in the broken iPhone days. iPhone Backup Extractor is a tool that makes this extremely easy.
Select Other Files to get Apple’s stuff: Notes, Address Book, etc. The next thing to do is read the data. It’s all stored as sqlite, if you don’t mind using the command line you can use sqlite in Terminal to view the databases.
If you prefer an easy GUI tool, MesaSQLite will work. Run the program then select one of the .db or .sqlite files from iPhone Backup Extractor. Then select the table you wish to view, and press the Show All button.
Links
Apple’s article about iPhone backups (explaining the basics)
