Overtherailing.

Access SMS messages from an iPhone backup

An iPhone’s SMS history is stored in backups of the device as an sqlite database file which is readily accessible using the sqlite command line tools. The file in question is 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata.

My iPhone’s SMS backup database is located in:

/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/[uid]/

By cd’ing to the directory and typing:

sqlite3 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata

…One can now start poking around:

sqlite> .tables
_SqliteDatabaseProperties  msg_group                
group_member               msg_pieces               
message                  
sqlite> select * from message limit 10;
[...]

Neat.

Thanks to http://insend.de for some useful hints on the location of this file!