Recovering data from iPhone backup files

It seems there is a way to recover data directly from backup files! I had thought that because I had to restore both the iPhone and the iPod touch to factory defaults, all data was lost. Fortunately on subsequent backups of factory restored devices, iTunes creates a new backup file and leaves the original ones intact.

The backups are stored in the user’s library folder in Application Support/MobileSync/Backups. The full path is :-

~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup/

Each device backup file is stored in a hex-encoded folder within the backup folder. The contents are actually compressed so a utility is required to retrieve the contents. This one is written in Python, so the terminal is required to use it.

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-backup-decoder/

For extracting iPhone notes an SQLite Database Browser 1.3 is required as this information is stored as records in an SQLite database.

What is interesting is that extraction also reveals all the data files for other applications. So if the huge SpeakEasy audio file from a recent meeting is still in the backups somewhere, then I may be able to finally get it into a audio program to clean up. SpeakEasy currently does not have a way to export these files.

I’ll have some more to say about this process later