iPhone backup

gpw928

gpw928

My 13 year old Windows box just died. No point resurrecting, as it's Windows 8.1, but I do need a new way to back up my iPhone (that does not involve Apple's cloud). It's running iOS 16.5.1(c).

Is anyone backing up their iPhone with comms/libimobiledevice?

I have failed at the first hurdle:
Code: 
[sherman.191] $ uname -a
FreeBSD sherman.my.domain 13.2-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p1 GENERIC amd64
[sherman.192] $ sudo lsusb | grep Apple
Bus /dev/usb Device /dev/ugen2.3: ID 05ac:12a8 Apple, Inc. iPhone 5/5C/5S/6/SE/7/8/X
[sherman.193] $ idevicebackup2 -v
idevicebackup2 1.3.0
[sherman.194] $ mkdir -p iPhone
[sherman.195] $ idevicebackup2 -i backup --full ./iPhone
No device found.
[sherman.196] $ sudo idevicebackup2 -i backup --full ./iPhone
No device found.
[sherman.197] $ sudo idevice_id -l
ERROR: Unable to retrieve device list!

Any advice appreciated.
 
I tried and I managed to find my device, but the released libimobiledevice tools are too old for newer iOS releases as you will run into an error sooner or later: https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice/issues/1439

You would need to build from latest source on github but I have not tried that myself.

Either the libimobildevice team releases a new version so that the FreeBSD port can be updated or the port would need to be changed to fetch source code directly from newer github commits (which is not really nice).
 
My understanding is the ports framework github sections make choosing a tagged vs untagged commit a similar process. Skimming commit messages they have some openssl3 changes so it may be worth reaching out to the maintainer to see if they are aware/interested in updating relevant ports; there has been recent work to try to get ports pushed up to openssl3 support in general.
 
I tried building from libmobiledevice from github source, without any success on FreeBSD.

However I built it on Debian, and it worked, sort of...

I have been in touch with the libmobiledevice development team, and it appears that the backup utility works on Linux (which I confirmed on Debian) but the "unback" option to unpack a completed backup does not. Apparently Apple did something that they have not (yet) been able to reverse engineer. So I can take a backup on Linux, but can not verify the contents unless I actually do a restore to the iPhone. That's too risky for me.

So I took the coward's escape. My ZFS server has heaps of disk space. I installed a Win 10 VM (without an activation key) on a zvol furnished from the ZFS server via iSCSI to the KVM server, installed iTunes, and got an backup. I'll deal with getting a cheap Windows 10 activation key if and when I ever actually need it (it's been running for several weeks now without the key).

I also exported all my contacts (a single ASCII file of VCARDS) via a gmail account. It took a while for me to figure out how to do that natively from the iPhone. The email got delivered to my regular FreeBSD mail box, and got saved to the file system, so will now get a regular backup.

I also had success using "ifuse" on Linux. I could access all the photos(as you can when the iPhone appears in Windows explorer).

So I have a backup three ways:
  1. with idevicebackup2 on Linux;
  2. via iTunes on a Windows VM; and
  3. contacts exported to email, and photos copied via ifuse.
None of the above has much to do with FreeBSD. However (1) is unverified, but I do expect recovery should work; (2) is the officially blessed method; and (3) works without Apple or Windows software and that's a good thing. I hope this helps anyone getting here via Google.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top