When is a backup not a backup?

Question

Level 1

8 points

When is a backup not a backup?

When it's made to your iMac. Last month, I backed up my iPhone 14 Pro on iTunes as usual, located on a middle-aged iMac running Ventura 13.7.6. This week, the 14 Pro went to Davy Jones Locker, and after a few days I gave up and ordered a 16 Pro running 18.5. I was forced to pirate my wife's iPad cable connect with USB, and I went to iTunes to restore the device to backup, the phone would ding and connect, the device name would appear, but was inactive, preventing access to the backup screen. A day or two later, most crucial things like passwords, photos and songs have somehow been absorbed by the Borg and are on the new phone, but lots of getting apps and hand transcription, song and photo organization remains. Any thoughts on how I might yet reclaim that backup?

iPhone 16

Posted on Jul 5, 2025 5:47 PM

Reply

Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

85,296 points

Jul 5, 2025 7:23 PM in response to wilfredjr

When you make a backup of your phone or iPad to your computer, it creates an backup file in

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

~ = /Users/yourname

These files can be extracted by:

https://www.iphonebackupextractor.com/

And extracted.

If you backed it up to iCloud, your space storage on your iCloud may have limtied what was backed up.

Always test your backups before you need them to know what you have in them. From the sounds of it you got rid of the original, and are depending on those files to be complete.

Reply

Answer 2

wilfredjr Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 6, 2025 5:49 AM in response to a brody

OK, but wait, don't I have an ongoing problem here, with my iMac failing to recognize my new phone? It's been my practice to use iTunes and Photos to control the memory consumption of the iPhone by rotating playlists and dumping photos to the Mac. I now put the new phone on the cloud with 50 GB. You were right, the reason I wasn't using the cloud in the first place was that it filled with photos over time that it was going to be cost prohibitive. I had extra libraries on hard drives from over the years. I don't know how long fifty GB will hold up. I'm thinkimgI have to put the Mac storage in the cloud as well to have them share properly. True?

Reply