iPhone Backup Extractor

My son recently had a problem with his iPhone. Between too many drops and plugging it into an incorrect power source he rendered the phone inaccessible. The only thing on the screen was a message saying the phone needed to be restored. When he plugged it into his PC to restore it, iTunes said the phone had a passcode and could not be restored. Through research I found that in this case you can power off the iPhone then power it on again while simultaneously holding the power and home buttons. Then you should receive a message that the phone is in restore mode and you can restore it through iTunes. Unfortunately my son’s phone’s power button was broken through a drop so I could not perform this procedure.

Getting him another iPhone was not a problem, but he wanted his contacts and pictures. Unfortunately he had not setup an Outlook storage file and his contacts were not synced with Outlook. I did more searching and I found some software that could extract his data from a backup. It is called iPhone Backup Extractor and is available at www.iphonebackupextractor.com. A limited version of the software allows you to extract 4 contacts total and 2 other files at a time. I used the limited version to see if his backup was good, but was surprised that some of his contacts had no phone numbers. I paid $24.95 to register the software (it is only good on one PC and is tied to the hardware). With the full-featured program I extracted the Address Book SQL file from his backup then exported it to an Excel spreadsheet. I then saw that he had many phone numbers styled incorrectly (with +1 or 1 in front of the area code but bracketed with the area code (1234)). After I corrected some of these in Excel and imported them into Outlook, I had contacts which could be synced back to a new phone.

iPhone backup Extractor is a powerful program and can retrieve your iPhone data from a backup if you lost or broke your phone. The trial version is nice because it let’s you see if the program will work for you before buying. Check out this software if you need your data, your iPhone is unusable or unavailable, and you have good backups.

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