evaporate

Evaporate is a command line tool written in Rust that makes the process of extracting messages (iMessage and SMS) from an iOS (iPhone/iPad) backup. Don't be fooled by the multitude of tools online which claim to be free; most require a paid license or subscription after you've already downloaded it and viewed your messages. Most tools especially require payment to extract a backup into another format. Evaporate is actually free and open-source, so download and use it as much as you want at no cost!

Install

Evaporate is listed on crates.io, so it can be installed from there. First, install Rust on your machine and then execute:

$ cargo install evaporate

Assuming ~/.cargo (or the equivalent on Windows) is on PATH (it likely is), you should be able to execute the evaporate command. If you ever want to uninstall, just execute this command:

$ cargo uninstall evaporate

Usage

First, your backup must be unencrypted. In the future, the tool may support encrypted backups if the password is known, but not currently. Then, find the file path to your backup and run this command in your terminal:

$ evaporate <path-to-backup> -o <path-to-extraction>

The backup will then be extracted to the specified output path in a human-readable format. Currently, it extracts messages, photos, and contacts from the backup into the following format:

<output-path>
  | contacts.txt
  | messages
      | <contact-1>.txt
      | <contact-2>.txt
      .
      .
  | photos
      | IMG_0001.JPG
      | IMG_0002.JPG
      .
      .

If you want to see more features added, please consider contributing! If there is enough demand, I will make a contribution guide document. Otherwise, please still create issues and pull requests to help out with the project.

Acknowledements

Huge thanks to Rich Infante for writing his guide Reverse Engineering the iOS Backup. No code is directly copied from his guide, but many of the techniques shown in it are used to decompose iOS backups. The guide helped reduce the time required to write this tool significantly.

License

Evaporate is licensed under the MIT License.