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On iPhones and Game Data Back-ups: Restore Data With MobileSyncBrowser

12:08 pm, September 30th, 2009, Craig Grannell

I lost all my game progress, and all I got to show for it was this lousy dialog box.

One of the dumbest decisions Apple made regarding iPhone and iPod touch is devices wiping all traces of an app when it’s deleted, but providing no means for saving preferences and progress. Unless you use an uninstaller to remove an app or game from your Mac, you can usually pick up where you left off after a reinstall; savvy Mac owners can also fiddle around with preferences, moving them between Macs to ensure consistency across machines in app environments or videogame progress.

iPhone and iPod touch don’t allow such things. Spend hours making headway in Peggle and then, for whatever reason, delete and reinstall Peggle (by accident, or through having a restore go wrong), and your progress is gone—you have to start again. It’s like 1980s arcade games after the plug has been pulled, or cheap, miserly Nintendo DS games that lack a battery back-up in the cartridge, erasing progress and high scores when the device is powered down. For a platform Apple’s pushing as the best solution for handheld gaming, it’s asinine that you cannot export and import videogame progress and save states.

There is a workaround, however, using the shareware app MobileSyncBrowser, but it’s not for the faint-hearted…

For this to work, you need the Plus version of the app, which enables you to delve into the files in your back-up. [CORRECTION: Developer Vaughn Cordero notes: "While the Photos & Other Files category is the (logical) interface to CoreRestore, this latter feature is available across both Classic and Plus versions. Using Photos & Other Files to selectively preview and extract the files themselves is a Plus feature." Therefore, aside from exporting files, the other steps should work with the standard version of the app.]

1. Select files for backing-up

Navigating an iPhone back-up

Open Photos & Other Files and navigate to Library > Preferences. Within, you’ll find a bunch of plist files. If you like, you can select and export them to poke around with them in the likes of BBEdit, to see what information they contain. Typically, this folder is where most games seem to store progress information.

You then Option-click the components you’d like to create a back-up for and go to File > CoreRestore > Save. This creates a date-stamped folder with ‘CR’ (standing for CoreRestore) also appended. You should note down somewhere what game/files this back-up refers to.

2. Delete and reinstall apps
If you delete an app, its save is now (hopefully) saved in your CR back-up. Reinstall it later and it’ll be fresh, without your progress.

3. Start a restore

Starting a restore from iPhone.

Connect your iPhone to your Mac and Control-click it in the iTunes sidebar. Select Restore from Backup.

4. Select a back-up

Selecting a back-up for restore.

Select the relevant CR back-up from the Restore dialog. Click Restore.

5. Wait

For a very long time.

Quick caveats:

• I highly recommend you take a full copy of your back-up folder in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup before mucking about with partial back-ups. If something goes wrong, you can switch your copy back and do a full restore.
• If your iPhone explodes, or—worse—you lose your Peggle saves, too bad. This is an ‘at your own risk’ tutorial.

Overall, I’m impressed a developer has taken the time to figure out how to create partial back-ups, notably of game data, but the process leaves a lot to be desired (which isn’t really the fault of the dev). There’s no guarantee you’ll pick the right files, nor even that a game’s save data is within the Preferences folder, although this was the case with the games I tried. And although it was brown trousers time during the restore process (which took well over an hour—seemingly, the iPhone did a total restore, with the CR back-up then adding specific files), it did enable some ‘lost’ scores and progress to be ‘rescued’.

What this most highlights, though, is the simple fact this kind of thing shouldn’t be necessary. Already, some developers get around the problem of app deletion/reinstallation by housing scores and progress online via user accounts, but I’d sooner see Apple provide a simpler back-up process itself. Given that Apple’s current stance is that iPhone and iPod touch can do all sorts of things the PSP and DS can’t, it’s a huge shortcoming that the thing most important to many gamers—the safeguarding of game data—is one of the weakest aspects of Apple handhelds.

Note: MobileSyncBrowser also provides the means for backing up and restoring things like call logs and SMS messages. The CoreRestore feature is just one component highlighted for this particular article.

Posted by Craig Grannell in Tips & Tricks, iPhone, iPhone Apps | Comment on this article

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