Last Updated : | Wide Angle Software
If you back up your iPhone using iTunes (or Finder on macOS Catalina or higher), the backup file is stored on your PC or Mac... but where?
Want to find your backup location, extract data from a backup, or restore your iPhone from a backup? You're in the right place.
Where are iPhone backups stored? On Windows systems, your iPhone backups are usually located here: \Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ . However, this can vary from system to system.
You can access your backup location manually through File Explorer, or automatically using iBackup Extractor. Here's how to find where your backups are stored on your PC...
To locate a list of your backups manually, follow these steps:
Your backups will now be listed for you as seen in the image below. Note that these files are not human-readable. If you need to view and access this data, skip to step 3.
To locate your device backups automatically, follow these steps:
You can also browse through your backup content using iBackup Extractor in a readable way, which you can't do otherwise!
For information about how to browse and even extract content from your backups, skip ahead to extracting data from an iPhone backup.
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Where are iPhone backups stored? On Mac systems, your iPhone backups are located here: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
To access this location, click in the menu bar, then type the address above.
-Or-
To find a specific backup:
Note that these files are not human-readable. If you need to view and access this data, skip to step 3.
As these backups are designed to keep your data safe, until needed for an iPhone restore, you cannot view and access individual items within the backup - e.g. if you want to copy out a particular photo album to your computer.
If you'd like to browse your backups, and extract data from them to your PC or Mac, you'll need a third-party software like iBackup Extractor.
If you should need to retrieve data from your iOS device backups, such as contacts, messages, photos and more, iBackup Extractor can do just that!
With iBackup Extractor you can even access and view the contents of iPhone backups on your computer FREE.
Download the free trial version of iBackup Extractor today, to see what you can extract from your backups to your computer.
Free iBackup Extractor DownloadThere are many reasons that you'd need to restore an iPhone from a backup: Troubleshooting problems on your iPhone, data loss, and a broken/damaged device to name a few.
Here's how to restore an iPhone backup from your computer...
If you run into any issues when attempting to restore a backup to your iPhone, Apple's iTunes guides are great!
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