Comments on: Recover data from an iPhone backup

By: Sharninder

Sharninder — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:24:47 +0000

Short answer: I don’t know.
Long answer: You might be able to re-encode the Addressbook and put it back at the same location “on the iPhone” but that’s only possible if it’s jailbroken. Even then I don’t think those autofill entries come from the address book, I think the mail client keeps them in a separate db of it’s own, which I haven’t really explored.

By: Bleeder2112

Bleeder2112 — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:03:31 +0000

Bloody brilliant article, mate!

By: Cristine

Cristine — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:55:10 +0000

Sharminder, thanks for such a great site! Quick question, I have an iPhone 3GS OS 4.0.1 that has never been jailbroken (and apparently can’t be at this moment). I want to delete some of the autofill email address entries in my mail program (my phone pulls email from my gmail account) but nothing works to do this. I used the iPhoneBackupExtractor to download the AddressBook.sqlitedb file and manually deleted the entries using Visual SQLite.

My question now is do you know how I replace the original file with my modified file?

By: Sharninder

Sharninder — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:12:51 +0000

Sonia, If you’re sure you’re looking at the correct backup file, try using the graphical tool – sqlite browser http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/files/ to look at the data. When you’re sure this is the data you want, use the “select” query that I’ve given to get that data in a text file on your desktop.

By: Sharninder

Sharninder — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:07:13 +0000

Joey, you can try and check the iTunes backup folder to see if iTunes did actually make a backup of your device or not. Other than that, I’m not sure if I can be of any help to you. If the iTunes backup wasn’t made at all for some reason, then I don’t think you can recover your data, considering that you’ve already flashed a new firmware.

By: sonia

sonia — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 02:01:06 +0000

i’m in the midst of a situation that seems similar but i guess i don’t know macs well enough to recuperate my data. basically my ipod died, but i was able to sync it first. i plugged the new one in, and it insisted on updating the itunes before it synched with my data, and then it would *not* properly sync with my previously stored data on the computer. instead, it created a separate persona. so while i gained all my applications, i did not regain all the passwords for them. i did get my contacts back. unfortunately the one most important thing i need is some info i wrote in notes.

i did what you said, i found the mobile sync backup from the correct day, and using the utility (this is all on a mac) i bring up that data and i can put it into a folder on my stupid apple desktop. but it does not have any contacts/notes — only applications that i put on the ipod. is the notes data still there somewhere? i recently restored a bunch of data off my ancient ipod onto a pc, but obviously macs are not as easy to work with : (

btw itunes does give me the option to restore and sync it with the old version of my ipod contents, but then it gives an error message and although it’s synching, it does not come up with the stuff i saved on it. it syncs as though it were brand new and just retrieving the apps off the computer.

the apple store was nasty, and unhelpful on this issue, of course. and they gloated about how my warranty ran out friday. (classic!)

By: Joey

Joey — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:46:50 +0000

The thing is I’m going truly crazy at this second. Yesterday idiot me, was in a hurry and when I connected my iphone 3G with my itunes, which i haven’t done in the last 4 months.. again idiot me, and the update to software to 4.0.1 just popped up on the screen, and I just said yeah, whatever and clicked go on man! Really, I should be out of my mind because I always check those things and try to back up it before any update because of the things that I’m afraid might happen. And to my idiot luck it did happen… :( It said while it was updating that it was backing up the phone. So I went to sleep and left it open so that it can download on its own, and in the morning I just get it off the itunes and went to work. Then remembered to check my messages just to see an empty page. Shock! Then I came back home hoping I can restore my phone from the backup it had yesterday, but again to my luck, the idiot itunes hadn’t backed it up yesterday, I mean when I said back up today it just backed up to the four months before backup. In other words,I want my messages, and contacts back!!!Pleaaseee helpp, they were soo important to me. Please I just couldn’t understand what to do, helppp :( Please?

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 16:26:39 +0000

I know it’s been a while since you posted this but wanted to say thanks. I had a hard time finding the date conversion formula. Yours works perfectly!

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:04:33 +0000

I had success with this just now using the trial version of “Iphone Backup Extractor” extracting the “AddressBook.sqlitedb” file from my “Library” folder then downloading/installing the Windows version of sqlite3 (http://mislav.uniqpath.com/rails/install-sqlite3/). From there just playing around with the above. Thanks! My iphone isn’t cooperating with me currently and this saved me a lot of heartache. :D

By: Sharninder

Sharninder — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:00:17 +0000

Since, you have never synced with iTunes, you won’t have an older backup but ideally when you restore through iTunes, the software first creates a backup of the phone and then installs the firmware. BUT, since your phone has crashed, I’m not sure how iTunes will behave in your case. If it does take a backup, you can get your contacts back following these instructions. If it doesn’t, well, you were going to lose everything on the phone anyway in the first place.