Older iOS support?

[allenm518]

Hi great tool, thank you for making it available.

I am attempting to recover messages and attachments from older iPhones before donating them. One of which is on iOS 9, when I point the path to the back up folder, I received the following error

Invalid configuration: Specified path /Users/allenm/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/old_phone/ is not a valid SQLite database file!

And then included the iOS option and received the following error:

Invalid configuration: Database file /Users/allenm/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/old_phone/3d/3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 does not exist at the specified path!

In my backup folder, there are no nested folders such as 3D. Within the backup folder, there are only the database files.

So instead, I point the back up to the chat database folder 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28. This works and does export text messages, however, no attachments are found. In the terminal I get repeated errors that attachments were not found at the specified path. the listed paths have multiple nested folders, which again I do not have in my backup folder. When I include the iOS option, having pointed to the chat database file, I receive the error

Invalid configuration: Database file /Users/allenm/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/old_phone/3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28/3d/3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 does not exist at the specified path!

This seems like it is an issue with the architecture that iMessage exporter is expecting for iOS back up. Is there a limit to how old an iOS version I can extract messages and attachments from?

[ReagentX]

iOS backups older than iOS 13 use a different backup structure. imessage-exporter targets the current release only but maintains compatibility at least as far back as iOS 13.

[unchewyglees]

@allenm518, you were able to export the messages from your older iPhone? I'm trying to do the same, but I'm running into an error (see below). Do you know which version you ran? I'm wondering if a change was made since the version you used...

Invalid configuration: Failed to query table: no such column: message_summary_info in SELECT guid FROM message
WHERE message_summary_info IS NOT NULL
AND length(message_summary_info) > 61
AND instr(message_summary_info, X'7472616E736C6174696F6E4C616E6775616765') > 0
AND instr(message_summary_info, X'7472616E736C6174656454657874') > 0 at offset 48

[ReagentX]

How old is your backup?

[unchewyglees]

It's the same as @allenm518 iOS 9, specifically 9.3.5. I just did the backup of this, and it's on OS 14.8.2

By the way, I was able to use your awesome tool on my older, but newer iPhone and it worked with iOS 12.5.4

[ReagentX]

This is an issue with the message_summary_info data not existing on older iOS versions. This will be resolved via #648 and will be included in the next major release.

[ReagentX]

The message_summary_info issue was resolved in the Chaparral Lotus release.