For all those people who did a clean install of Snow Leopard and do not want to restore any data from Time Machine, you may find manually recover your iPhone Apps & data a huge time saver over re-downloading everything. Well you are in luck, as the solution is fairly simple.



App Recovery

1. Navigate to your last Time Machine Backup on your external drive.
2. Locate you home directory under the users folder from the root.
3. Apps are stored in ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications. Just drag them into the iTunes window, with Applications selected from the sidebar. On the next iPhone sync, iTunes copied them onto the iPhone.

1. Disable automatic syncing in the iTunes preferences under Devices.
2. Replace ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/abc123 with an older version from Time Machine. Note that abc123 is a very long alphanumeric key identifying to your iPhone -- make sure you get the right one, in case you sync with several phones or iPods.
3. Plug in the iPhone.
4. iTunes is going to want to erase and sync your iPhone, it sounds terrifying but do it. It may also complain about replacing user account info... this is okay too.
   
5. Control-click (in the iTunes sidebar) on the iPhone and choose Restore from Backup. At the end of the process, your iPhone will automatically restart.

Backups are important... I can't say it enough. For us Apple users, Time Machine is surprisingly effective. But what makes it really useful is the hidden ability to backup over to a network share. This is something that should be enabled by default... but then who would buy an Apple Time Capsule *gasp*

Open a terminal and run:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then you can use a Samba or AppleShare (even Netatalk) server share as a time machine backup location. This works perfectly, as Time Machine creates a disk image with an HFS+ filesystem on which to perform backups, and mounts that.

I found this out a while ago when looking for info on reading .DMG files on Windows or Linux boxes. Long story short, its a very painful process and not worth the time. Then I found this tip. It creates ISO images from DMG images, so they can be burned elsewhere.

To convert the file to an ISO image, type the following command at your terminal window:

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso


Replace /path/to/filename.dmg with the path and name of the existing .DMG file, and replace /path/to/savefile.iso with the desired path and name for the converted image.

This then creates an ISO image burnable in Nero on Windows, or pretty much anything on Windows that will burn ISOs and same with Linux. Conversion can be slow, but it works.