Backup Explorer for iPhone & iPad (Photos, Messages, Contacts)

About the Backup Explorer for iPhone & iPad (Photos, Messages, Contacts)

A computer backup made by Finder, the Apple Devices app or iTunes is a folder of thousands of files with coded names: those programs can restore it to a device, but they do not let you look inside it. This page reads it in your browser and shows what is inside: photos and videos from the camera roll (with those still in Recently Deleted marked), messages with their attachments, contacts, notes and voice memos.

It opens the computer backup of an iPhone or iPad that you choose, reads the backup's own list of files and the databases the device's apps keep, and names everything the way the apps do: conversations by their people, photos by their camera folders, recordings by their titles. Nothing is uploaded, and the backup is only read, never changed.

Without a pass this is a free preview: the counts per category, the lists of photos and videos, conversations and recordings, the latest messages of each conversation, the first contacts and notes, and small watermarked thumbnails of the first photos. Saving photos, videos, conversations, contacts, notes and voice memos, and copying a note or a conversation as text, need an Ultimate pass.

Common uses

• Getting the photos and videos out of the backup of an old or broken device.
• Keeping a conversation, with its pictures, as a web page, a spreadsheet or a PDF.
• Moving contacts to another address book or mail program as a vCard file.
• Saving notes and voice memos from a backup without restoring it to a device.
• Checking what a backup holds before restoring it, or before deleting it.

What a computer backup holds, and what it leaves out

Apple calls a computer backup “almost all of your device’s data and settings” (Apple). It leaves out data already synced and stored in Apple’s online storage, such as the photo library and the messages a device keeps in sync online; content from the iTunes and App Stores, and PDFs downloaded straight to Apple Books; things synced from a computer; Face ID and Touch ID settings; Apple Pay; Apple Mail; offline maps; and Activity, Health and Keychain data unless the backup is encrypted.

So when a device keeps its photo library or its messages in sync online, the backup has none of them, and no program can find them in it. That is why the page shows the counts of each category before anything is paid for.

Backups are not encrypted unless you choose it. Encrypted ones also keep saved passwords, Wi-Fi settings, website history, health data and call history (Apple); this version reads backups that are not encrypted, so call history, which only encrypted backups keep, is not available here.

Where the backup is

On a Mac, backups are in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ (Apple); Finder shows a backup’s folder from Manage Backups with Show in Finder. That Library folder is hidden and protected by macOS, so copy the backup’s folder somewhere else (the Desktop, or another drive with enough space) and choose the copy.

On Windows, the Apple Devices app does the same with Show in Explorer. Apple’s page gives the starting point as %USERPROFILE% for the Apple Devices app and iTunes from the Microsoft Store, and %AppData% for the older iTunes. Folders inside AppData may also be refused by the browser; copy the backup’s folder out first if that happens.

The page reads folders the way a folder upload does, so it works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on a computer.

How the page reads a backup

A backup stores each file it keeps under a name made from a code of its app’s area and its path, and keeps the list of them in Manifest.db, a SQLite database (older systems wrote Manifest.mbdb instead). The page reads that list, then the databases the apps keep: Messages (sms.db with its attachments), Contacts (AddressBook.sqlitedb and its pictures), Notes (NoteStore.sqlite, and notes.sqlite on older systems), the photo library (Photos.sqlite) and Voice Memos. They are opened with SQLite itself, compiled to WebAssembly, in your browser; a database the device was still writing has its newest changes in a log beside it, and the page adds them as SQLite would.

Apple does not publish this format, and each system version changes the databases a little, so the page asks every database which tables and columns it has before it reads it. What it cannot read, it says, and never guesses.

Deleted photos and messages

Photos and videos deleted in the Photos app stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days (Apple), and a backup made in that time still has them: the page marks them and saves them in a folder of their own. On newer systems, messages in Recently Deleted can be in the messages database too; the page shows them in their conversations, marked.

Messages deleted for good are no longer in the messages database’s tables, but parts of them can remain in its unused space until it is reused. To look for them, open the messages database itself in SQLite Database Recovery: it is the file in the folder 3d of the backup whose name begins with 3d0d7e5f (on older systems, at the top of the backup folder).

What is saved, and how

Photos and videos keep their own names, in their camera folders (100APPLE, 101APPLE …); edited versions are saved beside the originals with “(edited)” in their names, and photos in Recently Deleted in a folder of that name. Each conversation gets a folder with a web page and a text file of its messages and an attachments folder; one spreadsheet holds every message. Contacts become one vCard file, which other address books and mail programs import, and a spreadsheet. Notes become text files in folders named after the Notes folders. Voice memos are saved under their titles and dates.

In Chrome and Edge on a computer the files can be written straight into a folder you pick; every browser can save them as a ZIP file, which keeps the files’ dates. Choose a folder on a drive with enough space.

What the page is tested on

The page’s automated tests use backups generated by the tests themselves, laid out as Finder, the Apple Devices app and iTunes lay them out: Manifest.db and Manifest.mbdb file lists, binary and XML property lists, and messages, contacts, notes, photo-library and voice-memo databases written by SQLite with the tables and columns the apps use, including newer and older versions of them and a log of changes written by SQLite itself. Every saved file is compared with the original, byte for byte. Backups of real devices vary more than any test set, and no success rate is claimed for them.

Trademarks

Apple, App Store, Apple Books, Apple Pay, Face ID, Finder, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, Live Photos, Mac, macOS and Touch ID are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. MySmartCoPilot is not affiliated with Apple, and Apple has not sponsored, authorized or endorsed this tool.

Limitations

• This version opens backups that are not encrypted. For an encrypted backup it shows how to make one that is not; it has no password field and never tries to guess a password.
• Only what the backup holds: data the device keeps in sync online with Apple is not in a computer backup, and the page cannot reach the device itself or any online storage.
• Call history is kept only in encrypted backups, so it is not available in this version.
• Conversations of other messaging apps kept in the backup are not read in this version.
• Notes locked with a password stay locked. Pictures, drawings and tables inside notes are named in the text, for example [Picture], and are not saved in this version.
• Apple does not publish the backup format and changes it between system versions; a database the page cannot read is reported as such.
• Each database is opened in your browser’s memory, up to 1 GB each. Thumbnails need the browser to decode the photo (HEIC photos through this site’s own decoder, downloaded once) or, for videos, WebCodecs.
• Use it on backups of your own devices, or ones you have the right to examine.

Privacy

The backup is read by your browser on your device; nothing from it is sent anywhere, and the page works offline once it has loaded (its SQLite engine and HEIC decoder come from this site). The page only reads the backup and never changes it. Use it on backups of your own devices, or ones you have the right to examine.