Comments on: Saving Voicemail on a non-Jailbroken iPhone

By: Andrew B

Andrew B — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:19:28 +0000

Thanks. I needed to look at non-mddata files as well.

By: denis2342

denis2342 — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:24:29 +0000

You can also append -Rp to the cp command to get the date when the voicemail was backupped. sadly appe does not copy to original date of the voicemail while backupping.

Denis

By: Lorna

Lorna — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:23:55 +0000

at that link I see an application for saving text messages, but, not phone messages…

By: ericb

ericb — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 03:37:51 +0000

Ack – sorry, Richard – your very helpful comment got lost in the moderation queue until I found it just now. Apologies!

By: Richard Owen

Richard Owen — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 16:01:17 +0000

See my later post for doing this on Windows:
http://strangelydim.com/2009/11/24/saving-voicemail-on-a-non-jailbroken-iphone/comment-page-1/#comment-255

By: Richard Owen

Richard Owen — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:59:44 +0000

See my later post:
http://strangelydim.com/2009/11/24/saving-voicemail-on-a-non-jailbroken-iphone/comment-page-1/#comment-255

By: Richard Owen

Richard Owen — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:57:54 +0000

For Windows:

Get the free 'file' command:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/file.htm

For Windows XP go to: \Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

For Windows Vista and Windows 7 I've heard it is this, but have not confirmed:
\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

The voicemails (I did this on XP) are in files with no extension. The file command can figure out which files are audio files and the following command line (you will need to modify it to include it in a batch file) uses the file command to copy off the audio files (they are all voicemails it seems) to .amr files which can be read by QuickTime or maybe the Real Player:
@for %f in (*.) do @(for /F "usebackq tokens=1,2* delims=; " %g in (`file %f`) do @(if %h==Adaptive copy %g %g.amr))

I also learned from this post, so credit due:
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Download-Voicemail-from-an-iPhone/

By: Darlene Wong

Darlene Wong — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:11:13 +0000

Thanks for sharing this tip. I am running iOS 4.2.1 on an iPhone 3G. The following modification works for me:

pushd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup ; for I in `find . -name "*" -exec grep -la '#\!AMR' {} \;` ; do cp $I $OLDPWD/$I.amr; done ; popd

By: ericb

ericb — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 20:05:58 +0000

Yikes - I hope you're able to recover the voicemail! I still don't have an iPhone 4, so I still can't help directly, but if you're on a Mac, I'd try Justin Smith's suggestion (above) for Decipher VoiceMail. It supposedly works on later versions of iOS, and is probably more tested than my hack method. I haven't tried it personally, but it's probably worth a shot. If you're on Windows, you might be stuck with the much more expensive The Missing Sync. In either case, I'd say one of those two is going to be your best bet - hopefully you have a backup that was made recently enough to have the voicemails. I would probably avoid creating any new backups for the time being just in case a newer backup might overwrite an older one.

By: Edward H

Edward H — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:41:29 +0000

Hello Eric,

I am desperate for your assistance. Somehow AT&T wiped out all of my saved voicemails during an upgrade on my iPhone 4 from the original OS (4.0) to the current OS (4.2.1). The voicemails wiped out were only saved ones (about 20 or so), new, unlistened to messages (2 from October), were retained and accessible. I contacted AT&T and after a couple hours between different departments, i was told my messages are gone!

My hope is that I can retrieve the messages from a backup file. The reason for the dire need of the files is that I have messages from my mother (she unexpectantly passed away in October) to my kids, singing happy birthday and other fond memories.

If you have any suggestions I would be highly appreciative and grateful for your efforts. Thank you!