Backup your iPhone’s Voicemail Messages

07 Jun 2009 2 Comments

Voicemail messages on the iPhone are stored in the AMR format (playable by Quicktime), and if you need to back up your messages you can do so using the method below.

Firstly you’ll need to Jailbreak your iPhone so you can get remote access to it via SSH. Download and use PwnageTool as per these instructions to Jailbreak the iPhone, then open Cydia and install the OpenSSH package if it hasn’t been installed already.

Launch the Settings app on the iPhone, choose “Wi-Fi“, then turn “Wi-Fi” on and connect the iPhone to your Wi-Fi network (or create a Wi-Fi network on your Mac by clicking the Airport icon in the menubar and choosing “Create Network…“, then connect the iPhone to that).

After the device connects to the network, tap the blue right-pointing arrow next to your Wi-Fi network entry in the Settings app and make a note of the iPhone’s IP Address on the network.

iphone-sms-settings-wifi

Open a new Terminal window on your Mac, then enter these commands to copy the iPhone’s Voicemail Messages to a “voicemails” folder on your Desktop (replace “{IP_ADDRESS}” with the IP Address you noted above):

mkdir ~/Desktop/voicemails
scp root@{IP_ADDRESS}:/private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/* ~/Desktop/voicemails/

When you enter the scp command you will be prompted for a password, simply enter the default iPhone root password (‘alpine‘).

 

Related posts:

  1. Exporting your iPhone’s SMS Message Database to a CSV file
  2. Enable Emoji Characters on iPhones outside of Japan
  3. Setting up custom voicemail greetings in Asterisk
  4. Configure Gmail IMAP accounts properly in Apple Mail and on the iPhone
  5. Changing the default MySQL root (or other user) password
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2 Responses to “Backup your iPhone’s Voicemail Messages”

  1. Michael Updegraff Reply 08 Jun 2009 at 02:46

    willem – you might want to include (jailbreak req.) in your titles. I keep clicking into your articles to discover I must jb my iphone :-(

  2. willem Reply 16 Jun 2009 at 12:33

    Hey Michael

    The capabilities of the iPhone are increased ten-fold when you Jailbreak it, you might want to give it a try.

    The latest versions of PwnageTool will do everything for you, and if you have a valid iPhone contract, you don’t need to make any modifications to the Bootloader to unlock the iPhone on your network.

    In other words, if you perform a Jailbreak without modifying the Bootloader, you can restore your iPhone back to factory settings with iTunes if you wanted to without any detrimental effects.

Afrigator