iPhone Backup Extractor
release notes

We hope you're keeping safe and well in these strange times. It's been a few weeks since we last shipped an update. That's not because we're not on the case, but rather because we're working on a few bigger-than-usual things. However, today we're releasing a roundup of enhancements for iPhone Backup Extractor. Watch this space.

• Improvement Backups for some devices are now faster to create.
• Improvement PDF text is now searchable and copy-pastable.
• Improvement The "Extract" button in the messages previewer now extracts all messages if no conversations are selected.
• Improvement We've prettied up the loading indicators for macOS users on older systems.
• Improvement Current iPhone or iPad battery percentage is now available through rictl device info.
• Improvement Loading of previewed messages on macOS is now faster and less jittery, and sorting of WhatsApp messages is better. We've also tweaked consistency of our capitalisation and fixed a typo in the UI. Just as we giveth, we also taketh away: message bubbles now sometimes have square bottoms. We're going to squash that shortly.
• Fix Fixed an issue where some message attachment images would be missing from PDFs if there was an error loading their orientation.
• Fix Fixed password entry box losing focus (so you had to click on it again) when the provided password was incorrect.
• Fix Message extraction from Viber could crash on some unusual sets of data. Now fixed!
• Fix If you selected a previewer whilst data was still being loaded, it might end up deselected itself. No longer!
• Fix We've fixed orientation problems in the macOS photo previewer.

Today's release is a minor update fixing an iCloud bug we introduced in yesterday's build. Apologies if you received an error from it.

• Fix We resolved the "invalid operation" error that might have popped up when working with iCloud; this issue was introduced fewer than 24 hours ago.

Funny how things can be more complicated than they seem, isn't it? Today's release has a major overhaul of how iPhone Backup Extractor displays message previews. Users will find they start to appear much more rapidly when browsing conversations: there's no more waiting around for them all to appear. We've also made the interface look more similar to the iOS messages app. In doing so, we bid farewell to macOS 10.10; this release doesn't change Windows compatibility, but it does mean macOS users must be on 10.11 or above.

• Feature We're released a substantial overhaul of our message preview functionality. The interface looks better — and should perform much better. Users can select multiple conversations for extraction with Cmd, Shift, and or Ctrl, depending on their platform. Feedback is appreciated. We'll return to this in future releases with some more cosmetic and optimisation work.
• Improvement We've tidied up the General tab in Preferences, and moved Recover deleted data from the message previewer up into there for consistency.
• Improvement Recovery of deleted messages is now disabled by default, as it makes the preview and extraction process much slower. (As you might expect!) You can turn it on in Preferences as and when you need it.

It's been an unusual while since our last update, hasn't it? 3 weeks. You'd be forgiven for thinking we were up to something, and we are. We've been laying the groundwork for a reworked feature, and you should get to see that in the next week or so. In the meantime, we're shipping an improvement to our Screen Time passcode removal and ECG activation processes, making them easier than ever to use.

• Improvement Tweaks to the Screen Time passcode removal and ECG activation processes: after your phone reboots, it won't show the skippable setup prompt that it used to show.

We're pleased to be shipping 7.7.15.2610 with a roundup of improvements to notes, WeChat and Apple Watch data. In the meantime, we're deep into preparing the next build. Watch this space!

• Feature Encrypted notes from iOS 10 or above are now supported on Windows. We shipped support for these on macOS in the prior release.
• Improvement We now show the time at which a backup was created at the top of the backup info pane, making life easier for users with a lot of backups created close to each other. Of course, the left-hand navigation still shows them in the order they were taken.
• Fix We've made a lot of improvements to extraction of unusual notes.
• Fix We've straightened out how Apple Watch backups are shown, dealing with the unknown.
• Fix We've resolved an issue when extracting or previewing WeChat messages with special characters.

Today's release of iPhone Backup Extractor 7.7.14 is a big one, with some massive performance improvements to backup access. Let's take a look at what's new:

• Improvement We've made a wide-reaching changes to how we load data, optimising loading of the file list of a backup, counts of data in backups, and how we extract photos. Loading backups should be around 2-4x faster for most users, and photos extraction should be around 10x faster, although the larger the backup and the most photos there are, the greater the likely performance increase. We've also significantly reduced the amount of disk space used when extracting photos. Let us know what you see!
• Improvement We've re-ordered the categorisation of data types in the left-hand navigation, making it easier to access local backup data.
• Feature The macOS version of iPhone Backup Extractor now recovers encrypted notes from iOS 10 or above. (It already supported older versions of iOS.) We're expecting to ship this for Windows in the next release we make.
• Fix We've squashed an issue whereby no photos were being identified as "slow-mo" when extracting photos. They were still coming out, but just not being categorised as this. Now they are.
• Fix There was an issue preventing backing up the same device twice in a row. We've now resolved that.

We're off to a pretty busy start this year with updates, and it's exciting to be shipping the second release of the week. Today we're rounding up a collection of optimisations and bugfixes.

• Improvement iPhone Backup Extractor will be much faster when it comes to counting your data in the overview. More to come here.
• Fix We've resolved a rather strange issue whereby some messages from the sender would end up grouped in an "unknown" conversation. Sorry about that.
• Fix We've resolved another issue affecting iOS 4 users. That's 2 fixes for iOS 4 in as many weeks. In 2020! Who'd have thought it?
• Fix We've fixed a bug where the message previewer was sometimes getting the counts wrong when they were all selected.

Today's release is a Mac-only update that resolves an issue where recent macOS versions of iPhone Backup Extractor weren't able to update themselves without the Mac being rebooted. Who wants to reboot their Mac? We don't.

• Fix iPhone Backup Extractor can now update itself properly again (as it used to be able to do!)

This week's a double release week, with our second update to iPhone Backup Extractor arriving today. We hope you like this one, and we'd love to hear feedback on the new ECG/EKG functionality.

• Feature iPhone Backup Extractor now includes a function to enable the Apple Watch's ECG capability for supported devices that are territory locked. We're launching this feature as a beta as it works for some quite specific use cases. We'd love to read your feedback on it.
• Improvement iPhone Backup Extractor will now show full mobile data for backups or devices or devices with multiple SIM slots. In China, that's phones with two SIMs, and in the US and Europe, that's devices with a SIM and eSIM.
• Improvement Occasionally iPhone Backup Extractor would show the preview of the backup device with the wrong colours. Not any more.
• Improvement We've made a number of improvements to rictl whereby it won't wait to talk to additional iOS devices if it can successfully issue commands to the selected device.
• Improvement We've added a tooltip on the Windows version to show image metadata when previewing photos, matching what we already did on macOS.
• Fix We've patched a crash bug affecting some iOS 4 users. Yes, iOS 4 is still a thing. You should see our pile of iPhones.
• Fix Forensics mode no longer restates the sender's handle above every sent message in previews; PDF exports as are before.
• Fix Image rotation should now be correct for all SMS and image previews on Windows.

We've got a bunch of improvements and tweaks ready to find their way into iPhone Backup Extractor, and we're off to an early start this week with today's build. Hi!

• Improvement Switching between backups is now faster than it was before, as we've made the loading process less intensive, and users should find switching backups is now more responsive. This has come about from a series of changes to different parts of the process.
• Improvement Loading of data is now a little faster, too.
• Fix In very rare cases, the Windows app would show previews from the previously-selected backup.
• Fix On the Mac, pressing multiple keys when the left-hand navigation had focus could sometimes make it select multiple things simultaneously, which didn't make any sense. Won't happen now.

We're pleased to be shipping our first release of 2020, with a number of improvements to help users make the most from their licenses. We've got a host of new functionality that we're looking forward to shipping over the coming months. Happy new year!

• Improvement We've changed how we display the differences between the free and paid editions of iPhone Backup Extractor within the app. The language and interface we use now is hopefully clearer and simpler — and looks a good deal more modern.
• Improvement We've improved the dialogs that a user gets when running into any sort of overcapacity issue with their activations or devices.
• Improvement We've removed a few assets from the app that weren't used, reducing its size when installed.

This release is a minor update for Windows users that resolves a crash affecting the free edition.

• Fix Resolved crash problem on Windows. Sorry for the inconvenience!

After another busy week at Reincubate HQ we're shipping some neat updates to iPhone Backup Extractor. Today's release includes:

• Feature It's now possible to open files directly from "Expert mode": just right-click and choose "Open file". This makes life a lot easier when exploring large backups for data.
• Feature "Expert mode" now makes it possible for users to remove folders and their contents.
• Feature We've added support for pulling live device info using the rictl command.
• Improvement Work with directly connected devices is now cancellable. Happy days.
• Fix We've resolved an issue where image captions weren't shown when previewing messages.
• Fix Users recovering a legacy restrictions PIN could occasionally run into a crash. We've resolved that.
• Fix The right-click menu wasn't always working on the left-hand menu on Windows. Now it is.

This release is a minor patch, addressing an issue that broke some functionality with rictl in the last release.

• Fix Restored rictl device functionality.

We're gearing up for a few neat releases before Christmas, and here's the first of our December updates.

• Improvement The "Recover Screen Time password" menu item is now enabled when users have a backup selected, and will prompt them to connect a device. We've tweaked some of the copy in the app around Screen Time, too, to make it clearer.
• Improvement We've done a lot of reworking of our left-hand menu. Previously, if you repeatedly selected a number of different backups before each had finished loading, it could sometimes do strange things. This behaviour has been thoroughly ironed out. We've a few additional enhancements we'll be making in this area in the coming releases.
• Fix iPhone 11s are now correctly identified in the left-hand menu. They always should have been, as they're fully supported, but they were being referred to as iPhone12,3. Sorry!
• Fix Unnamed conversations were previously extracted to unnamed files: .pdf, for example. Oops. We've fixed that now.
• Fix Contact names in the WeChat message preview were being displayed as a hash instead of the contact's name. Now they're shown properly. 👍
• Fix We fixed a very unusual crash where the Windows version of iPhone Backup Extractor could occasionally come unstuck when previewing photos.

It's been a little while since our last iPhone Backup Extractor update as we've been juggling a few important new features and updates. Today we're releasing a few of those in 7.7.6.2400, and we'd love your feedback.

• Feature Device management commands are now available in iPhone Backup Extractor's command-line tool, rictl. Users can now script and perform device discovery, backup, shutdown and restart using rictl. This functionality is available over USB and Wi-Fi for Windows users, and USB only for macOS users. We're expecting to ship Wi-Fi support for macOS shortly, and we'll be adding more functionality to rictl in subsequent releases.
• Feature The built-in rictl tool's backup info command now provides a password hash for encrypted backups in the classic $itunes_backup$* format that hashcat uses.
• Fix Group chat participants weren't always shown correctly in the Messages data, and we've now fixed this.
• Fix We've resolved an issue affecting previews of large images from the sample backup.
• Fix We've made extraction of rich contact data more reliable; it was leading to a crash in some rare cases.

We're thrilled to be releasing iPhone Backup Extractor 7.7.5 with support for removal of the Screen Time passcode on iOS 13.1.1 and above, and with support for removal of Screen Time on macOS through the phone. This once again completes our support for Screen Time passcode reset and recovery across every version of iOS.

We've also taken a deep-dive into message extraction reliability, closing off a number of unusual problems that had cropped up.

• Feature Removal of unknown Screen Time passcodes on iOS 13. 🎉
• Improvement We've made a few minor tweaks to the layout of the Preferences window.
• Improvement Images on the welcome screen are now even crisper on macOS.
• Fix We no longer count folders as well as files when extracting content in "Expert mode". This led to numbers varying across the app, depending on how we were doing the count.
• Fix In some cases, phone numbers and email addresses which shared address book labels were missed in the preview and in CSV exports. This is now resolved.
• Fix We've fixed a bug that caused handles in WhatsApp group chats not to display (or to display incorrectly) in certain situations.
• Fix When extracting multiple conversations to PDF, each conversation file wasn't always starting at page 1. This is now resolved.
• Fix We've fixed a rare edge-case whereby the presence of HEIC files was causing extraction of photos to fail.
• Fix We've resolved an issue where iMessages weren't always shown in chronological order.

This release is a macOS-only fix release, resolving a problem affecting some users.

• Fix Some users were experiencing a crash when they ran iPhone Backup Extractor for the first time. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

We're shipping a small update to iPhone Backup Extractor today, to make the Screen Time passcode recovery process clearer for iOS 13 users.

• Improvement The Screen Time Passcode recovery wizard spells out what needs to be done on iOS 13, and links to our resources on this.
• Fix A handful of smaller internal changes.

Today's update is macOS-only, fixing a crash issue we introduced in yesterday's release. Sorry.

• Fix Fixes crash in yesterday's build, triggered by Screen Time recovery, app view or expert mode extraction.