{"id":20083146,"url":"https://github.com/datatags/mount-ios-backup","last_synced_at":"2025-10-04T11:57:32.260Z","repository":{"id":170138965,"uuid":"626219516","full_name":"datatags/mount-ios-backup","owner":"datatags","description":"A tool to mount iOS backups as a FUSE filesystem","archived":false,"fork":false,"pushed_at":"2024-04-18T18:59:18.000Z","size":46,"stargazers_count":9,"open_issues_count":0,"forks_count":1,"subscribers_count":1,"default_branch":"master","last_synced_at":"2025-09-20T18:45:22.175Z","etag":null,"topics":["backup","decryption","ios","ios-backup","libimobiledevice","python"],"latest_commit_sha":null,"homepage":"","language":"Python","has_issues":true,"has_wiki":null,"has_pages":null,"mirror_url":null,"source_name":null,"license":"other","status":null,"scm":"git","pull_requests_enabled":true,"icon_url":"https://github.com/datatags.png","metadata":{"files":{"readme":"README.md","changelog":null,"contributing":null,"funding":null,"license":"LICENSE","code_of_conduct":null,"threat_model":null,"audit":null,"citation":null,"codeowners":null,"security":null,"support":null,"governance":null,"roadmap":null,"authors":null,"dei":null,"publiccode":null,"codemeta":null}},"created_at":"2023-04-11T03:12:38.000Z","updated_at":"2025-08-31T16:58:55.000Z","dependencies_parsed_at":"2024-04-18T19:56:37.568Z","dependency_job_id":"c756f5e4-e318-4350-8113-6eef7c1d58fc","html_url":"https://github.com/datatags/mount-ios-backup","commit_stats":null,"previous_names":["datatags/mount-ios-backup"],"tags_count":0,"template":false,"template_full_name":null,"purl":"pkg:github/datatags/mount-ios-backup","repository_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/datatags%2Fmount-ios-backup","tags_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/datatags%2Fmount-ios-backup/tags","releases_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/datatags%2Fmount-ios-backup/releases","manifests_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/datatags%2Fmount-ios-backup/manifests","owner_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners/datatags","download_url":"https://codeload.github.com/datatags/mount-ios-backup/tar.gz/refs/heads/master","sbom_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/datatags%2Fmount-ios-backup/sbom","scorecard":null,"host":{"name":"GitHub","url":"https://github.com","kind":"github","repositories_count":278308622,"owners_count":25965654,"icon_url":"https://github.com/github.png","version":null,"created_at":"2022-05-30T11:31:42.601Z","updated_at":"2022-07-04T15:15:14.044Z","status":"online","status_checked_at":"2025-10-04T02:00:05.491Z","response_time":63,"last_error":null,"robots_txt_status":"success","robots_txt_updated_at":"2025-07-24T06:49:26.215Z","robots_txt_url":"https://github.com/robots.txt","online":true,"can_crawl_api":true,"host_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub","repositories_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories","repository_names_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repository_names","owners_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners"}},"keywords":["backup","decryption","ios","ios-backup","libimobiledevice","python"],"created_at":"2024-11-13T15:46:04.336Z","updated_at":"2025-10-04T11:57:32.230Z","avatar_url":"https://github.com/datatags.png","language":"Python","funding_links":[],"categories":[],"sub_categories":[],"readme":"# mount-ios-backup\nA tool to mount iOS backups as a FUSE filesystem. Useful for things such as:\n- Recovering photos from a backup without having to completely restore it to a phone.\n- Copying photos even from a working phone if the normal USB interface doesn't work well for you. (It certainly doesn't for me.)\n- Reading app data not normally accessible without a rooted phone.\n\n## Dependencies\n- `pyfuse`\n- `biplist`\n- `sqlite3` (built-in)\n- `fastpbkdf2`\n- `pycryptodome`\n\n## Usage\n\n```mount_ios_backup.py \u003cbackup\u003e \u003cmountpoint\u003e```\n\n## General information\n- Tested on a backup from a device running iOS 16, created by `libimobiledevice`. I don't think backup formats have changed in several iOS versions, and `libimobiledevice` backups should be identical to iTunes backups, so it should work on those as well, but I haven't tested it.\n- The mounted backup will be read-only. I don't forsee this changing because I don't want to deal with writing backup files when reading them is complex enough. Plus, it's more difficult to cause catastrophic issues on a read-only filesystem.\n- Mounting is done via FUSE, meaning you can unmount it by stopping the script or running `fusermount -u \u003cmountpoint\u003e`\n- This tool is not super focused on performance, and simply using `ls -l` may take a couple seconds on a directory with hundreds of items, such as the AppDomain folders, because that requires it to get file properties from the database (`Manifest.db`). File transfer speed shouldn't be impacted much, however.\n- When mounting the filesystem, `Manifest.db` is loaded into memory to avoid hitting the disk whenever possible. The largest manifest file I've seen is 240M, which shouldn't be a huge burden on most systems as it's less than I would expect any web browser to use, but I plan to make a flag to disable it.\n  - With RAM-caching, the script shouldn't take more than 1.25x - 1.5x the size of the manifest in memory usage.\n\n## Encrypted backups\n- This tool can mount encrypted backups as well (with the password of course.)\n- The password can be supplied through an environment variable (`BACKUP_PASSWORD`,) a flag (`--password`,) or interactively. The password will remain in memory until the script exits.\n- Due to limitations of the `sqlite3` library, the `Manifest.db` must be decrypted and written to disk before it can be opened.\n  - If RAM-caching is enabled, the file will be deleted after being loaded into memory, but without full-disk encryption, it may be recoverable.\n- Transfer speed is slower from encrypted backups.\n  - When transferring a single large file, I'm able to get about 100MB/s from an unencrypted backup, and 50MB/s from an encrypted backup on my machine.\n  - Smaller block sizes may hurt transfer speed more, as each read call needs to read data before and sometimes after the requested area.\n\n## Todo\n- ~~Handle symlinks in some fashion, since they apparently appear in some places~~\n- Avoid hitting the database for every call to `getattr` to improve performance?\n- Add command-line options, including:\n  - ~~`foreground`~~\n  - `allow_other`\n  - Disable RAM-caching manifest\n  - Standard mounting options?\n  - ~~`password`~~\n- ~~Support encrypted backups with https://github.com/jsharkey13/iphone_backup_decrypt~~\n- Return something more useful from `statfs`\n  - Currently returns stats of filesystem at mount point\n- ~~Figure out how to make it installable?~~\n","project_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Fdatatags%2Fmount-ios-backup","html_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/projects/github.com%2Fdatatags%2Fmount-ios-backup","lists_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Fdatatags%2Fmount-ios-backup/lists"}