offbyone<p>So this has been a useful Saturday morning.</p><p>Digikam - has a really solid set of search tools, let me quickly set up a filtered list showing my iPhone photos, which then showed me some (unexpected) gaps in my photo archive. (if you've never taken a look at the files, the images are numbered in sequence, so a missing number = a missing photo.)</p><p>Grabbed iPhone, pulled over the missing months. Done. </p><p>Also, have managed to (mostly) backup my iPhone to my Linux Mint laptop. That was a bit arduous, recipe follows.</p><p>There are 2, potentially 3, steps if you want to do this.</p><p>Archive your iphone.</p><p>This reddit thread (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1euono4/importing_imessage_data_from_iphone_to_linux/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/co</span><span class="invisible">mments/1euono4/importing_imessage_data_from_iphone_to_linux/</span></a>) says that you can use libimobiledevice to make an unencrypted backup of your iPhone. </p><p>Last updated in 2020, but what's the worst that can happen, right? (Documentation suggests that it is being checked against iOS updates and continues to work so....I guess?)</p><p>The project's webpage has install instructions for both Debian and Ubuntu (<a href="https://libimobiledevice.org/#get-started" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">libimobiledevice.org/#get-star</span><span class="invisible">ted</span></a>), I followed the Ubuntu script and, ok so far so good, installation complete.</p><p> Connecting my iphone, telling it to trust my laptop, and then entering ideviceinfo into the terminal showed that it could see and get data from my iphone.</p><p>(This thread was helpful with syntax questions that came up during the next step (spaces are your friend) <a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/1127798/how-to-run-a-iphone-backup-with-idevicebackup2" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">askubuntu.com/questions/112779</span><span class="invisible">8/how-to-run-a-iphone-backup-with-idevicebackup2</span></a></p><p>From there, open notepad and build out instructions to pull a full, unencrypted archive of my phone.</p><p>back into terminal, work through the mistakes, and voila, a 200GB backup sitting in my documents folder. </p><p>inhale, exhale, go for a walk</p><p>Step 2 (or 2 and 3)</p><p>imessage-exporter works on iPhone backups. And following the steps above, we now have one.</p><p>So how do we get this thing running on Linux Mint.</p><p>Fortunately, there is a binary.</p><p><a href="https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter/blob/develop/imessage-exporter/README.md" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">github.com/ReagentX/imessage-e</span><span class="invisible">xporter/blob/develop/imessage-exporter/README.md</span></a></p><p>Using something called cargo.</p><p>Hmmmm.</p><p>Anyway. (and this is the potential extra step) entering that command into Terminal told me that</p><p>1- cargo is installed<br>2- it's out of date</p><p>the additional step -> Great. update cargo, and what the heck is cargo anyway.</p><p>Poking around (and I did a lot of poking around this morning, I've no idea where this misplaced confidence in my computer skills came from today but whatever) I found that</p><p>Cargo is part of the Rust environment; and</p><p>Rustup (claims) that using this _completely different_ set of terminal commands will install a current version of things.</p><p>Ok. sure.</p><p>So I did that and then repeated the imessage-exporter install. Which failed, with the same error message.</p><p>I will now jump forward a lot of time, and provide the answer which is to close, and then reopen, the Terminal. It needed that to refresh the version of Cargo.</p><p>This time, entering <br>cargo install imessage-exporter<br>worked.</p><p>So, the sequence so far</p><p>install libimobiledevice<br>use devicebackup2 to build a full iPhone archive<br>install imessage-exporter</p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/linux" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>linux</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/iphone" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>iphone</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/archive" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>archive</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/backup" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>backup</span></a></p>