Recover Photos from iPhone Backup file

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Level 1

41 points

Recover Photos from iPhone Backup file

Is there a way to recover photos from an iPhone backup file on a computer? I've had to restore the iPhone from scratch in an attempt to fix some cellular reception issues. The photos that were on the iPhone were not synced to iPhoto prior to the restore. I think they may still exist in the iPhone backup file from before the restore. Is there any way to recover these photos without restoring the phone from that backup file?

 20" iMac G5, 8GB First Generation iPhone, Mac OS X (10.5.3)

Posted on Feb 28, 2009 5:04 PM

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Answer 1

Daiya

Level 4

1,666 points

Mar 1, 2009 7:09 PM in response to Sean Moody

Haven't tried this myself, but there is a MobileSync Browser that is supposed to give you access to the backup file. Google it--third-party, not supported by Apple, use at own risk. No clue whether it includes the pix from the Camera Roll.

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Answer 2

Mar 1, 2009 7:41 PM in response to Sean Moody

MobileSyncBroswer does not access photos as the previous poster suggested. Without restoring the iPhone from that backup, you might be able to access the pics using this tool. If that doesn't recover the pics (the developer mentions call history, SMS, contacts, not pics), the only way to extract the pics from the backup is probably beyond the casual user. You'd need to decode the backup using this Python script run in Terminal, then manually parse the resulting SQLite database. Note that the developer of the tool above is the author of the Python script as well - not sure if he included the complete backup contents in the dump from the GUI tool; I do know the Python script can access the photos in the backup.

Hope this helps...

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