I am prepping for moving to the iOS end user beta. In doing so I am reminded of one of my pet peeves with Apple’s iTunes Backup.
That is iTunes backups really aren’t complete backups. I have a 2TB iCloud account so my online backups are not constrained by space. I also like to do a manual backup to my Mac before any major iOS upgrade. In doing the backup today, I notice that my backup file on my Mac is only 10.3GB which would seem to be way too small. Since I have Apple Music and iCloud storage, I am thinking they might exclude Photos and Music from the backups, but I still have 32GB of other stuff. Where is it? I wouldn’t think compression would get it down to 10GB.
I really would like backup/restore software which would literally put the iOS device back to the exact state it was in at the time of the backup. I appreciate that with iOS system updates that they don’t readily allow you to roll back to a previous version of iOS. I could live with that limitation.
Here are my questions:
(1) I am aware of tools which purport to be more capable than iTunes for managing iOS device backups. Do any members have first hand experience with a better backup and restore tool for fully backing up iOS devices to a Mac?
(2) Somewhat related I have been squirrelling away backups of every iPhone I’ve owned with the thought of someday being able to archive all of the iMessage and SMS messages. Anyone using a backup extraction tool which would let you pull all such messages from an iTunes iOS backup file and store in some useful format on their Mac?