AppleFileViewer
1 commentThe first launch from AppleFileViewer
AppleFileViewer opens the backups that iTunes, Finder or Apple Devices save on your computer and shows your photos, messages, WhatsApp chats, calls, notes and more. It works fully offline, requires no account, and is read-only by design, so the backup stays intact. Free and open source under MIT license. Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
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Free offline viewer for local iPhone backups across Windows, macOS and Linux: photos, messages, WhatsApp, calls and notes.
The iTunes backup format is encrypted and undocumented, and the official tools let you restore the whole phone or nothing. If you just want to pull a message thread from last year or check whether a photo is in the backup before you factory-reset the phone, you are out of options.
AppleFileViewer decrypts and indexes the backup locally, with no upload and no account. The read-only design means the backup cannot be modified, which is the right trade when you are looking at the only copy of something. I have not tested it with encrypted backups yet. The first thing I would check is whether it handles backups that span multiple files gracefully, or whether it expects a single monolithic backup and fails partway through when the structure is different.