Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by Nicholas_C on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:43PM
(#7054641)
I lost my iPhone (had it stolen?) a few weeks ago along with several years of text messages, voice recordings, and notes from my best friend I had known since 5th grade who recently passed away. I had always planned to back it up or record it somehow but was only starting to get to it when I lost it. My greatest regret of 2013 is not backing up those texts, notes, voicemails, etc.. Back it up as soon as you can and don't put it off or you may regret it. Thankfully, I had backed up all our pictures over the years, and backed up that back up, but I would pay a lot of money to have that phone back.
As long as you plugged your iphone into your computer regularly with backups on, or joined your home wifi network while your computer was on the network with wifi backups on, it should still be in the backups, which would get loaded to your new phone if you loaded the new phone you bought from the most recent backup.
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by Nicholas_C on Monday January 13, 2014 @07:56PM
(#7054674)
I had an iPhone 4 with iOS5 and an extremely old version of iTunes. It hadn't synced it in a long time as iTunes had stopped recognizing my phone. Further, windows on the computer I used to back it up on is now not booting at all. I have assumed that all my iPhone data, if any, would be on that computer unless it was saved in the cloud. Is that correct?
EDIT: I also unregistered my iPhone because I bought an S4 and couldn't receive texts from those with iMessage turned on, as their phones were still iMessaging me. Am I doomed?
You could potentially remove the hard drive from that computer, then put it in an external casing and hook it up to a new computer. Then research software to pull messages out of your old backups. You could potentially still salvage the messages, it sounded like they were old ones
If you can recover the iPhone backup files that iTunes created from the hard drive (such as via an external enclosure like unepipe mentions), you should be able to recover the messages contained within. Messages are stored in a SQLite DB within the backup (this is how jwz's script reads them).
Looks like iTunes on XP stores backups at this path: \Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\. That's the directory you need to recover from the hard drive.
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by Nicholas_C on Monday January 13, 2014 @09:58PM
(#7055084)
Somehow I never considered this. Linux on my second partition actually boots up, so I can use my Linux OS to grab the files I believe. Thanks! I'll give it a shot!
If you search Github for "iphone sms" or "iphone messages", you can find lots of projects that will export your iPhone messages. So, if perl isn't your preferred language, there are plenty of other choices besides jwz's script.
I wrote an export script in Python that's fairly popular (200+ stars on Github): https://github.com/toffer/iphone-sms-backup
Unfortunately, I never did get around to exporting photos and videos.
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by famousactress on Monday January 13, 2014 @10:05PM
(#7055102)
Oh wow, awesome! Since python is my preferred language anyways I'll likely dig into this first.. since I'd be happy to toss you a pull request for sucking in images and video if feasible. Stoked to play with this later. Cheers.
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by artmageddon on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @12:57AM
(#7055614)
My previous iPhone is 4 years old(3GS, now I have a 5S), and I couldn't back up my texts because the backups are encrypted, and password-protected. I could swear I never put a password on them, but now I have no idea whether I really did or not. I don't know if it's something I can still extract off my old phone :(
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by quantumpotato_ on Monday January 13, 2014 @08:48PM
(#7054863)
What was the bug?
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by famousactress on Monday January 13, 2014 @10:11PM
(#7055135)
Coincidentally, before the friend I mentioned in #2 passed away we were out at a bar together and he was really interested in this girl who was there. They'd barely met and I guess he'd gone home and chatted with her on myspace. When I got up in the morning (he was living on my couch) he told me to go look at her profile. While cruising through his friends list I saw my now wife. I recognized her as being a friend of a friend I'd met months prior while we were both in a relationship. I pinged her surprised that her and my couch-surfing buddy were friends. They weren't. There was some sort of flaw in the rendering of my buddy's friends list and by the time we figured it out it had been resolved. That message started a really long conversation that led to our relationship. In fact I don't think we've gone more than a day or two without speaking since.
Hopefully the bug at least only allowed someone who was a friend of a friend (she was, just not my buddy's) to appear in the wrong list. Super sketchy if it was actually rendering complete strangers!
Regardless, I'm pretty sure if it wasn't for that bug I wouldn't be married to my incredible wife :)
Re:PSA: Back Up Your Shit
by quantumpotato_ on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @01:08PM
(#7058605)
That's quite funny. Deus Ex, perhaps? Congratulations of turning a glitch into something positive.
I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally pay you to add that.
[Edit: Since a lot of the other comments are questioning the value of saving this stuff I figured I'd share my use cases. It turned out when I thought about it I have at least three:
1. I effectively met my wife on myspace (believe it or not a pretty nasty software bug led to our relationship) and an enormous amount of our initial friendship and courtship ended up documented there. Years ago I painstakingly clicked through for hours and copy-pasted the conversation to a text document.
2. I had a close friend die very suddenly and at a young age. My memory generally kind of stinks and I hated that there were conversations with him that I half-remembered. I went back through social media conversations with him (again, mostly on myspace) a lot in the years that followed. It helped me piece together memories that are very important to me now.
3. This past year my wife and I adopted our daughter. Our relationship with her birthmother has primarily been via SMS and the months that followed were a really exhausting and beautiful blur. It's really important to us that we're able to share that thread with our daughter someday.
In none of these cases did I see it coming that these services would end up having such valuable content in them for me. I didn't know I'd meet my wife. I'll never know when the last time I talk to someone is, and I would have never guessed that one of the most important things I'll have to give my daughter about her birth story is an SMS conversation.
So yeah, having access to this stuff is important to me. Thanks to jwz for pulling these resources together. ]