How to parse the Manifest.mbdb file in an iOS 4.0 iTunes Backup

Question

In iOS 4.0 Apple has redesigned the backup process.

iTunes used to store a list of filenames associated with backup files in the Manifest.plist file, but in iOS 4.

Answer 1

I finished my work on this stuff - that is, iOS 4 + iTunes 9.2 update of my backup decoder library for Python - http://www.iki.fi/fingon/iphonebackupdb.py

It does what I need, little documentation, but feel free to copy ideas from there ;-)

(Seems to work fine with my backups at least.)

Answer 2

I liked galloglas's code, and I changed the main function so that it shows a sorted list of total size by application:

verbose = True
if __name__ == '__main__':
    mbdb = process_mbdb_file("Manifest.mbdb")
    mbdx = process_mbdx_file("Manifest.mbdx")
    sizes = {}
    for offset, fileinfo in mbdb.items():
        if offset in mbdx:
            fileinfo['fileID'] = mbdx[offset]
        else:
            fileinfo['fileID'] = "<nofileID>"
            print >> sys.stderr, "No fileID found for %s" % fileinfo_str(fileinfo)
        print fileinfo_str(fileinfo, verbose)
        if (fileinfo['mode'] & 0xE000) == 0x8000:
        sizes[fileinfo['domain']]= sizes.get(fileinfo['domain'],0) + fileinfo['filelen']
    for domain in sorted(sizes, key=sizes.get):
        print "%-60s %11d (%dMB)" % (domain, sizes[domain], int(sizes[domain]/1024/1024))

That way you can figure out what application is eating all that space.