How to Retrieve Your iPhone Contacts, Photos and Messages with iBackup Extractor

Apple products are thriving, and people are using iPods, iPhones and iPads more than ever. You keep your contacts, your messages, your photos, part of your life, locked away in a tiny machine. But what do you do when this device breaks or is lost? What can you do when you updated your device and you’ve lost data in the process? What do you do if you want to access your data, that little slice of your life, and you don’t have your Apple device with you? Well, read on to find out how to solve your problem!
How this works:
When you sync a device to iTunes on a PC or Mac, iTunes will create a backup of the data on your device. The backed-up information includes photos and video in the Camera Roll, Messages (iMessage, SMS, and MMS), Phone Favourites, Wallpaper, Contacts, Calendars, app data and more. For more information on how iTunes backs up your device visit [1]. This data is then kept until overwritten when you next sync your iOS device, or until you decide to erase it.  This is how you can access this data and extract your personal info from your iTunes backup.
STEPS

1

LOCATE THE DATA. You might have backups stored in different folders, but the default iTunes folder is always in a specific location.
On Windows 7 and Vista: Users(your_username_here)AppDataRoamingApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup

2

MAC: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

3

WINDOWS XP: Documents and Settings(username)Application DataApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup

4

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL IBACKUP EXTRACTOR ON YOUR COMPUTER. The free trial version of the software allows up to 50 items to be extracted.
iBackup Extractor runs on both PC and Mac, and more specifically, Microsoft Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as OSX10.7 or higher. It works with backups of all iOS devices.

5

RUN THE PROGRAM.

6

SELECT THE DEVICE BACKUP YOU WISH TO NAVIGATE ON THE DROP-DOWN LIST AT THE TOP. You can now proceed to retrieve whatever data you choose. If the device is protected via password, the software will request you to input it on the screen to access the data from your iPod or iPhone Backup.

7

VIEW AND RETRIEVE CONTACTS.
Click the Contacts Button on the left side. A list of your contacts will appear, with their details on the right.
You can select one or multiple contacts, and choose to how to retrieve them: as vCards, copy them to Windows Contacts, or copy them to Outlook. With this method, you can recover lost contacts on iPhone, or just backup existing ones.

8

VIEW AND RETRIEVE PHOTOS.
Click the Images button on the left side. A list of photos and images stored on your device will appear, and you can select one or more of them and extract them to your computer, or use the “View Photos” button to see the pictures at a larger resolution.

9

VIEWING AND RETRIEVING MESSAGES: Click the messages button on the left side. A list of all your messages stored on your device will appear, and you can select one or more of them and choose to extract them, or simply click them to display the conversation on the right-hand side.

10

OTHER FEATURES INCLUDE ACCESSING YOUR CALENDARS, YOUR INTERNET BROWSER HISTORY AND BOOKMARKS, YOUR NOTES, AND YOUR CALL LOGS. And if you are still missing data, be sure to use the Backup Explorer button to access the file system and access your data manually (advanced users only). This even allows you to retrieve app files directly from the file system.
WARNINGS
Be aware that in order to function, software such as iBackup Extractor requires the device to have been synced with iTunes at some point.
ARTICLE INFO
Categories: IPhone | ITunes
Recent edits by: Illneedasaviour, Teresa, Wikihowguru
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