Scanning your iPhone Backup Files

Here's a nice way to recover notes from your iPhone without having to mail them to yourself--although it's not for the faint of heart. James Duncan Davidson located where iTunes stores its iPhone backup data--at least mostly. There's an error in his write-up. It's actually stored in your home folder's application support directory in MobileSync/Backup. For me, that works out to be /Users/ericasadun/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. But getting back to Duncan Davidson's story, he took a peek at those files and noticed they were some sort of compressed SQLite3 files.

Following on that, "Mr. Flip", who is one of the iPhone web developer Google group members posted this simple extraction utility written in Perl. When run, it converts each of the backup files to a normal well-named SQLite3 db file. Following Flip's directions, I then downloaded a copy of the OS X version of SQLite Browser from Sourceforge and used it to view the contents of the backup db files.

Interestingly enough, when viewing the db files directly from the command line (via sqlite3 notes_01.db and .dump) I discovered that the iPhone saved my entire history of edits for my note files as well as the actual final content.

View Tags

Source: http://duncandavidson.com/archives/472

Categories

Hacks iPhone

Here's a nice way to recover notes from your iPhone without having to mail them to yourself--although it's not for the faint of heart....

Add a Comment

Sign in »

19 Comments

Filter by:

VaughnSC

No perl required:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33166

A Work in progress.

September 16 2007 at 5:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Erica Sadun

I'm guessing he fixed the typo after my post.

August 26 2007 at 1:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

NetMage

FYI, David's write-up is correct - the tilde is the standard Unix abbreviation for your home directory.

August 26 2007 at 1:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

elbow

In Windows, it's in
C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup

August 21 2007 at 8:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

martin west

Does anyone know where they are stored in windows?

August 16 2007 at 2:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

bgcat57

Moron question probably, but here goes...

How do I run a perl script? I'm not familiar with the script (other than knowing the name).

Do I need a special compiler or application? Whats the command string? etc.

July 31 2007 at 2:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brad

Wow, thanks so much ...

I've been keeping a food and sleep log for my doctor, but my kids (4 and 5) deleted my notes yesterday apparently ...

This has saved me ...

NOTE, the full note body is stored in the db:table

notes_01.db:note_bodies

Thanks again!

July 25 2007 at 8:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

BrianW

I just had to restore my iPhone, and noticed that the Notes were not restored. I'm using a Windows machine. Anyone else see this? Wondering if there's possibly a bug with the Windows version of iTunes, and/or with iTunes in general?

July 18 2007 at 7:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Masque

For Mac users only: If you prefer to see all the files backed up, try http://calmstorm.net/iphone/unravel.perl

It writes out a copy of the tree that's backed up. Lots of interesting plists in there, alongside the sqlite databases.

July 17 2007 at 2:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris

Does it also back up photos? I have lost my photos after the restore. I did the restore because iphoto would not recognize the iphone.

July 15 2007 at 2:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply