For the past few months, ever since I first bricked my iPhone actually (which has happened a numerous amount of times), I have been on the lookout of an app on how to extract the backups that iTunes make of your iPhone/iPod touch. So I recently tweeted about my problems, and a fellow twitter(er) (and apple expert), Shawin, suggested I use a program called the iPhone Backup Extractor, free to download with limited features and $25 for a full 1 year license which include the all the program features, updates and email support. A little steep in my opinion but everything comes at a price these days…
On to the review now. A relatively small download at ~530kb, the program runs instantly without any sort of installation. At first (and quite annoyingly), you are always presented with a screen where you have accept a license. It would have been better if it was possible to only have to come across this type of screen only at on the first boot.
After accepting the licence, you are presented with a screen displaying all the available backups that are currently present in the default folder in which iTunes saves the backups.
This Screen takes quite some time to show up since the program has to connect with its servers to check for update(which are quite regular) and to also to check for the available backups currently in your PC
After having chosen your desired backup, the program analyses it. The analyzing time varies anywhere between <15>
After the analysis is over, you are presented with 2 types of restores. With the first type you can restore all your Photos, Contacts, SMS history, Call History, Notes and Calendar entries. In the second type of restore you will be presented with the following screen:
As you can see, with file restore type 2 (also known as manual restore), you can choose whichever files you want.
Restoring about 800 files can take up to about 1 minute.
Once restored, all that is left to do is close the program and view all the restored files.
Once restored, you will find them in the folder where you had chosen earlier. As you can see, all the folders can be opened using excel.
Note: Once the extraction is done, the extracted backup will still be available on iTunes thus you don’t actually lose any data.
All In all, the Iphone backup extractor is an ingenious idea and is already very stable with stability releases coming out pratically every week. Available as free download with a 1 file extract limit, one can always try the program tho it might be a little steep at $25 but this is a great solution for saving all your data on non-jailbroken iphones.
Verdict: 5/5(Highly Recommended)
