(We’ve written separately on the trade-offs app authors face in deciding where to store user data.) The best way to explore and build familiarity where each app stores its files in iOS is to use the free edition of iPhone Backup Extractor. When building apps for iOS, authors have a number of decisions to make around how and where they store data. Understanding expert mode and iOS domains If you'd like an easier way to tell what's in your iTunes or iCloud backup, we provide a tool that does all this decoding for you. IOS 10, 9, 8 and 7 iPhone backup file locationsĪs you’ve seen, it’s rather difficult to work with files named like this. IOS 13, 12 and 11 iPhone backup file locations iOS 16, 15 and 14 iPhone backup file locations The file names are the same for both iTunes and iCloud backups. Here are some of the core SQLite database files found in the iTunes backup folder. In many versions of the iPhone operating system the same names are used. The filenames are encoded so they appear as strings of letters and numbers if you access the backup folder, using what is known as a hex-encoded SHA-1 hash. When an iTunes or an iCloud backup is performed for your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, important data is saved into various files within the backup folder. Understanding hashed file names in iOS backups

If you’d like to dig deeper and get technical, we’ll share the locations used by some popular applications, and explain why they use them. If you’d like to do that, you’ll find we’ve got a number of handy guides shown in the top menu of this site, which will guide you through that process. The simplest approach for recovering files from an iOS backup is to use iPhone Backup Extractor: the free edition will help you find and extract the files you need, as it can do so without you needing to know the detail in this article. It'll also help you build a better understanding of how files and folders are arranged on iOS. This article will help you find files belonging to a particular app inside an iPhone backup.

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