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mbdbEditor

Description

These tools decode/encode a mbdb file to/from a csv file. The decoder comes from a Stack Overflow answer, slightly modified to export all the fields to a csv file, while the encoder was written from scratch.

Files structure

The mbdb format is explained on The iPhone Wiki (little correction, the inode is an uint64).
The csv file has the following fields: file type and permissions, inode, userid, groupid, file size, mtime, atime, ctime, fileID, filename, link target, domain, flag, base64(datahash), base64(encryption key)[,property1_name,base64(property1_value) ... ,propertyN_name,base64(propertyN_value)]

Note: the fileID is not actually stored in the mbdb, it comes from sha1(domain-filename). It is exported for your convenience.

Usage

To convert a mbdb file to a csv:

./parse_manifest.py In.mbdb Out.csv

To convert a csv to a mbdb file:

./parse_csv.py In.csv Out.mbdb

Example

When I upgraded my iPhone from iOS 8 to iOS 9, I wanted to start with a clean installation, only restoring my SMS.
Since it is not possible to restore only this file, the trick consists to do a backup, upgrade, create a new backup, copy the files from the old to the new backup, and restore this modified backup.

  1. Create a backup with the libimobiledevice tools:

    $ mkdir iPhoneBackup
$ idevicebackup2 backup iPhoneBackup

  2. Decode the mbdb:

    $ cd iPhoneBackup/<UniqueDeviceID>
$ ./parse_manifest.py Manifest.mbdb Manifest.csv

  3. Now upgrade your phone/tablet, create a backup, decode it.
    From the first backup, copy/replace the files to the new backup, e.g. Library/SMS/sms.db and Library/SMS/Attachments*
    In Manifest.csv, add the entries of the new files, and don't forget to delete the old ones.
    It might be a good idea to check for duplicate inodes, some entries have the same inodes by default, I don't know what could happen with regular files.

  4. Now generate the new Manifest.mbdb and restore the backup:

    $ mv Manifest.mbdb Manifest.mbdb.backup
$ ./parse_csv.py Manifest.csv Manifest.mbdb
$ idevicebackup2 restore --reboot --system --settings iPhoneBackup