Hey Rob,
I was wondering how you back up and restore text messages for an iphone.
Thanks,
Matthew
Hi Matthew,
By default when you sync and backup your iPhone to iTunes on your computer Apple is backing up your text messages. And normally all that is needed to restore your text messages is a restore to previous backup. That is "normally" all that is needed. That said there are times when that does not work or a backup gets corrupted. In those cases there are a couple of different free programs out there to help you. For Mac there is Eric Sudans program - MDHelper. And on Windows there is the program - Reincubate.
MDHelper - Download
Reincubate - Link
Per MDHelper - here are some instructions I found on it.
What you need is one of the folders with tons of numbers as the name, it's inside
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
Place mdhelper in it and run e.g. ./mdhelper -C .jpg
The tool will then extract all Jpegs and place it on the Desktop in a folder called "Recovered iPhone Files".
You cant run the tool just on the .mdbackup files cause they are semi-encrypted. The information how to extract and de-crypt is sitting inside the file Manifest.plist thats in the folder aswell. For navigating the presence of Info.plist is necessary aswell.
again this is a great tool from Erica! I just ran that on my backups, extracted all pics in about a minute.
One more: If you use ./mdhelper -C .sqlitedb you will get back all your Addressbook and Calendar data, .plist for bookmarks and map bookmarks, .db for sms and notes
If you still have issues with this - there is another program for the Mac you can find here
Per Windows Vista I also found these instructions:
Under Windows Vista, all backup files are stored at
c:\users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\AppleComputer\ MobileSync\Backup\<long-name>
Where the long name is the key id of the backup iPhone.
Inside each directory there are a series of files. Each file with extension MDBACKUP is in fact a binary plist. To recover you need:
a) Locate the file that you need. You need to open each file and look at the first line and you will clearly identifiy the file name.
b) Rename the .mdbackup file to .plist.
c) Convert to a XML format plist (you can use http://140.124.181.188/~khchung/cgi-bin/plutil.cgi)
d) Confirm the file name under the "Path" key
d) Extract the part that is the file content (the "Data" key)
e) Place the content on the "Data" in another file and convert from Base64 to a binary file - There are several different ways to do it - I will leave this one for you to Google.
Voila! Your file is back. I've used this a few times to recover files from iPhones that were "accidentally" upgraded and locked and it works. You will be amazed by the number of files that iTunes back up.
If I could find the source for a binary-plist to xml-plist converter, I can write a backup list-and-restore program (grab the names, convert from the binary, extract the base64 and convert to the original file).
Category:
vip_iOS
-- posted at: 10:23am EDT