Hi Dónal , First, on the issue of not being able to see your Audiobooks under your iPhone music library entries, I believe you can fix this if you connect your device to your computer and use iTunes. At a guess, if you have your iTunes preferences set with the box checked for "Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing" on the Devices tab of your preferences (brought up with Command-comma), you can find your device in the sources table, expand it to show the various libraries, and then navigate to the "Books" entry under the expanded source tree under your iPhone. This is the source tree of your iTunes content on your device -- similar to the iTunes library on your computer, but with specific entries for your iOS device. Select the "Books" playlist (click on it with VO-Shift-Space after routing your mouse cursor to your VO cursor with VO-Command-F5), then navigate to the table of books with VO-Command-T. You should be able to view your audiobooks in that table, along with your eBooks. Start playing any one of these (e.g., navigate to an audiobook track in the books table for your iPhone, and press return). Stop playing and eject your device.
Check whether you are now able to view your audiobooks. I'm not sure how this works with the cloud backups, but I believe this does work for local iTunes backups of your device on your computer. James Austin will recall that when the iPhone update to iOS 4.2 came out, there was a weird bug so that your music didn't appear to be on your device. This was not due to a corrupted backup that actually lost your audio files, but due to a failure of the iTunes database stored on your device to properly update with the sync. Viewing the device library contents while your iPhone is connected to iTunes on your computer is a way to check that the tracks are really there, and starting to play any one of the "missing" tracks forces the iTunes library database file on the device to update. (There are some posts in the old archives from end of November 2010 that contain this information, but this would be difficult to search, since it's from the time when all list posts from the whole year were stored in a single mailbox.) As for extracting information from iOS backups, you can look for a command-line tool written by Erica Sadun called mdhelper. She described using this in a series of posts about iPhone backups back in 2008 in the O'Reilly blogs (1st four mentioned in the first URL): http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/erica-sadun/ http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/2008/07/iphone-backups-part-5-even-mor.html Get the mdhelper tool (revised since the original posts) at: http://ericasadun.com/ftp/Macintosh/ I have a list of links to all the original articles stored somewhere, but I think the above links (from a web search), pretty much cover the posts she wrote (5 in number). There's also a set of links to Erica's posts from the iPhone wiki that should cover the same material: http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Understanding_iPhone_Backup_Files If you do a Google search, you can find posts she has written about recovering photos, contacts, etc. with mdhelper. This is Mac-only. (I looked this up because I wanted to know how to extract ebooks from Stanza, before Apple made it possible to view files within apps.) HTH. Cheers, Esther >> On Sep 5, 2012, at 10:02 AM, Dónal Fitzpatrick <dfitz...@computing.dcu.ie> >> wrote: >> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> I've been having an interesting natter with Gordon off-list on the topic of >>> what I perceive to be a fundamental flaw in Apple's IOS backup strategy. >>> Apologies for the length of this mail, but I'd like list-members input. >>> >>> Ok I have a device and somehow, somewhere, something has become corrupted. >>> I can't see my audiobooks anywhere under the "more" tab in music. (I >>> mentioned this a few days back). >>> >>> Now if I do a clean instal on the device, everything appears perfectly. >>> However I lose my sms messages, old photos, that kind of thing. >>> >>> So this brings me to the nub of the thing. I think it would be lovely to >>> have the facility to have a clean install on a device, and then drop in >>> only that content you wish to preserve; in my case old SMS messages, photos >>> and the like. >>> >>> I think this has several advantages. first, it gets over the hump of >>> situations like the one in which I now find myself. Secondly, I don't know >>> about you, but over time I've accumulated lots of clutter in terms of apps, >>> settings, other garbage on my phone that, I believe slows it down and >>> causes faster degradation of the device's battery. >>> >>> So, does anyone know of a way to inject stuff from one backup into another? >>> I surely can't be the first person on the planet to want to do this. >>> >>> One last thing. If you're going to provide solutions based on >>> jailbreaking, do so off-list and not on it in order to respect the list >>> owners. I'm not averse to these solutions, but as this list is public, >>> let's keep thing clean, as it were. I'd prefer a solution that didn't >>> involve jailbreaking of course. >>> >>> Dónal >>> Dónal Fitzpatrick >>> dfitz...@computing.dcu.ie >>> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
