How to View iPhone Backup Files on Mac and Windows

iPhone Backup

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Alice MJ

Feb 21, 2025 • Filed to: Backup & Restore Data • Proven solutions

When iPhone is connected with your Mac for the first time, an iTunes backup will automatically be created in the Mac. Many users ask since there is an iTunes backup on Mac, is there any way to view iTunes backup in on Mac? Actually this iTunes backup is a SQLite database file. As we all know, due to privacy policy of Apple, this file is not in a readable format. You can neither access nor read it straightly on your Mac. In order to solve this problem, in this article, we are going to introduce an iPhone backup viewer to view iPhone backup on Mac. By the way, we will share you a similar way to view iPhone backup on Windows. We hope this will be useful for you. Well, let's see how to read iPhone backup.

How to View iPhone Backup on Mac

To view iPhone backup straightly on Mac, you can take Dr.Fone (Mac) - Data Recovery (iOS) as a try. This iPhone backup viewer can easily view iPhone backup files from iTunes backup and iCloud backup straightly. Currently, you can use Dr.Fone to read up to 11 files types from iPhone backup on Mac, including photos, videos, contacts, messages, call history, Safari bookmarks, notes, calendars, etc.

Dr.Fone (Mac) - Data Recovery (iOS)

Directly View iTunes backup and iCloud backup in 3 steps!

Selectively preview and extract iPhone data from iCloud backup and iTunes backup as you want.
Allows you to view contacts, SMS, notes, call logs, photos, video, etc.
Supported iPhone 15 and former that run iOS 17 and former.
Fully compatible with Mac 14.

Available on: Windows Mac

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Steps to view iPhone backup on Mac

Step 1. After installing Dr.Fone on your Mac, you need to select "Recover from iTunes backup" on the top of the main window. Then all iTunes backup files of your device will be displayed in the window. Select the one for your device and click "Scan" to extract contents from it.

view iPhone backup on Mac

Step 2. When the scan is over, the contents inside iTunes backup will be listed in categories like "Message", "Contacts", "Video", "Call History", etc. Then you can click files one by one to view iTunes backup on your Mac.

how to view iPhone backup on Mac and Windows

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Tips:

1. You can use trial version to extract iTunes backup and preview them. If you want to keep them on your Mac, you need to purchase the full version of Dr.Fone.

2. Except from reading iPhone backup on Mac, Wondershare Dr.Fone (Mac) - Data Recovery (iOS) is more like an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch data recovery program. It empowers you to recover data from both iTunes backup or directly from iPhone 3GS/4/4S/5, all iPads and iPod touch 4/5.

3. You can also access iCloud backup to view it with the feature "Recover from iCloud backup file" of Dr.Fone. The steps are similar to "view iTunes backup"

How to view iPhone backup on Windows

From the above introduction, we can know that the iPhone backup viewer - Dr.Fone has its Mac version and Windows version. So if you'd like to view iPhone backup on Windows, you can just try Dr.Fone - Data Recovery (iOS). It can help you to access and view iTunes backup and iCloud backup easily. And the operation is almost the same as that of Dr.Fone (Mac) - Data Recovery (iOS), So here we don't repeat the similar steps again.

Conclusion

Well, it is easy to view iPhone backup or iTunes backup on Windows or Mac with Dr.Fone. If you are going to extract and view iTunes backup, then you can try this iPhone backup viewer to help you finish it within 3 steps.