Recover iPhone Contacts from iTunes Backup on a Mac

In the event that someone has lost some or all of their contacts from Address Book or Outlook, but had them on their iPhone/iPad, there’s a way to extract the contacts data from the iTunes-hosted backup of their iDevice.

Since the procedure to do it for free can be a little tricky (lots of outfits are willing to sell you a way to do iPhone contact recovery for $24.95 and up), see below the jump for the way I did it.

1. Download iPhone Backup Extractor for Mac.

2. Create a new folder on the user’s desktop. For this example, I’ve named it recover.

3. Double click on the iPhone Backup Extractor application to launch it and click on the Read Backups button to automatically access the stored backups on your hard drive.

4. iPhone Backup Extractor will show you the contents of selected backup. Choose iOS Files and click on the Extract button.

5. iPhone Backup Extractor will prompt you to select the folder where it will extract the backup files. Choose the recover folder you created in step 2.

6. Full backup extraction will take 3 to 15 seconds, depending on the amount of data.

7. Once the extraction is done, navigate to /Users/username/Desktop/recover/iOS Files/Library. Here you will find all important data you need to restore including notes, SMS and the address book files which contain your iPhone contacts.

8. Open Terminal and run the following command:


cd "/Users/username/Desktop/recover/iOS Files/Library/AddressBook"


(Replace username with the user’s login.)

9. Once you’re in the AddressBook directory, you should see two files:

AddressBook.sqlitedb

AddressBookImages.sqlitedb

AddressBook.sqlitedb has the contact data that you’re looking to export out.

10. Next, run the following command:


sqlite3 AddressBook.sqlitedb


11. The prompt should change to sqlite>.

12. Now run the following commands in the order given:


sqlite> .mode csv
sqlite> .output contacts.csv
sqlite> SELECT ROWID, First, Last, ABMultiValue.value, record_id FROM ABPerson, ABMultiValue WHERE ROWID=record_id;
sqlite > .quit


A new file named contacts.csv should appear in the AddressBook directory.

Note: If the user’s backup is encrypted, you’ll get an error when running the following command. The backup will need to be decrypted from iTunes before trying step 12 again.


sqlite> SELECT ROWID, First, Last, ABMultiValue.value, record_id FROM ABPerson, ABMultiValue WHERE ROWID=record_id;


13. If there were no errors, open up the contacts.csv file and check the data inside. If necessary, remove any duplicated items and re-save the document as a .csv file.

14. Import the contacts.csv file into your contacts list.