iPhone Backup Extractor
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We've just launched version 3 of the award-winning iPhone Backup Extractor. For those of you not familiar with iPhone Backup Extractor, it provides a way to recover information from the iPhone or iPad backup files that are automatically created when you sync your device with iTunes.

"But what use is that?", I hear you ask. Well if you lose or damage your phone then the only official way to recover the lost information is to sync your new phone. But in order to do this you've first got to buy a new phone and then hope that the restore process works properly (which is by no means guaranteed). And what if you've already got information on the new phone that you wish to keep (the Apple restore process wipes out anything already on the device)?

In those cases your only hope is to recover critical data from an existing iPhone backup file. And that's where iPhone Backup Extractor comes in. Since we launched the software in early 2009 we've helped thousands of people to recover data ranging from priceless family photos to business-critical contact data.

And with our latest update we've now added location extraction. If you've been following the recent newspaper reports then you'll know that it's been discovered that iPhone devices keep a record of where they've been. With iPhone Backup Extractor 3 you can retrieve this information as a KML file which can then be imported into Google Earth. Why not give it a go - you may be surprised just how accurate it can be!

As always you can download iPhone Backup Extractor for free.

• Feature We've added the ability to export your iPhone's location data as a KML or CSV file.

Today's releases sees full iOS 4.3 support and a whole bunch of further improvements to exported contacts.

• Feature iOS 4.3 support! Apple made several minor back-end data changes in iOS 4.3. We've made sure iPhone Backup Extractor is fully up to date with these changes and can extract from all databases created in any iOS and iTunes version.
• Feature iPhone Backup Extractor now features a process that can extract encoded contact information in vCards when non-ASCII characters are present. This is great for importing contacts that contain multiple languages or non-western characters.
• Improvement The application has improved vCard (.vcf) functionality when extracting data. This includes several changes to the way formatting is handled and helps users import contacts into Outlook more effectively.
• Fix When extracting vCards in earlier versions of iPhone Backup Extractor, Windows raised errors when names in the AddressBook database were too long for Windows to handle. This has now been fixed and vCards file names are now limited to 50 characters, with a dupe-free process to add extra file protection.

Many people use our application to recover or move their contacts from their iPhone or iTunes via the iTunes backup files. We offer two ways of extracting the data so it can be moved to contact manager applications like Outlook, Entourage or Gmail.

One of these ways is with CSV files, which can be exported well into any of these systems. The second is via vCard (.vcf files); we export vCards because they're easy to use and familiar to many of our users. However we have found that Outlook in particular has trouble opening single .vcf files containing more than one contact.

To remedy this, we've just launched an extra option to use when exporting contacts. Contacts can now be exported, split over many vCard files, and this is now the default. Options for CSV and "one big vCard" are still available in the top menu as before. These are saved into a "Contacts" folder at the location chosen in the application.

• Feature Export as VCard now lets you export many single cards as well as one big one.

• Fix Added a whole bunch of speedups and reliability fixes, particularly for OS X.

• Feature New 64-bit version for Vista, XP or Windows 7 x64 following many requests.

• Feature Now allows for restore of calendar to CSV.

• Improvement Better message when running into invalid or encrypted files.

• Feature Supports automated restore to CSV.
• Improvement Support for Windows 7 pre-release.
• Fix Many fixes: is faster.

• Fix Various updates to improve reliability with OS 3 and iPhone 3Gs.

• Improvement Interface is much clearer.
• Improvement Application image previews are shown.
• Fix Issues fixed with "missing files".

• Improvement Handles greylist problems with first generation iPhones; displays backup date and summary information about each backup

• Fix Handles "missing domain corrupted" backups gracefully, fixing problem where users see no files to restore.

• Fix Handles "duplicate corrupted" backups gracefully, fixing problem where users see no files to restore.

• Fix Correctly extracts all app-specific data.
• Improvement Various interface improvements.

• Feature Added support for iTunes 8.1 backups.

Whoops! In yesterday's release we broke listing of files for restoration. This new release fixes that.

• Fix "Select Files to Restore" no longer appears empty for some users.

• Fix Improved support for Linux and OS X paths.
• Fix Various improvements to the registration system. Thanks for registering!
• Fix Improved image handling.

Following popular demand, iPhone Backup Extractor is now available with a point-and-click interface. It works well on Windows, OS X and Linux (via mono or Wine), and can rapidly retrieve backed-up pictures, AppStore app data, SMS messages, and the rest.

• Improvement Brand new interface, making iPhone Backup Extractor easier to use by all.

• Fix Minor bug-fixes and tweaks.

The first iPhone Backup Extractor release. If you've found you have the need to retrieve files from an iPhone backup but cannot, you might want to have a look at this.

• Feature It's live!