IPhone – How to resolve “iTunes could not back up the iPhone because the backup was corrupt”

I hopefully have a solution to this issue. I also had this problem, and I believe it's because you have insuffient disk space and iTunes being a large program requires so much disk space to be available in order to perform these tasks.

Therefore, iTunes will bring up the error after reaching 2/3 of the way and then the error appears: "iTunes could not restore the iPod/iphone 'NAME' because the backup could not be saved on the computer." The backup you did is there because you're obviously selecting it when "restoring from backup". So free up some disk space and redo the "restore from backup" and it should complete the process without any errors.

It depends whether the remaining files you have are from an encrypted backup.

It won't be feasible to read your backup data if you have an encrypted backup with no Info.plist, Status.plist, or Manifest.mbdx files

However, if your backup wasn't encrypted, it will be possible to read that data. You'll find that whilst the filenames are unhelpful (they're SHA-1 hashes of the file's internal path), the file contents easily readable. It's only the filenames that'll be lost.

If you're looking for images, try renaming a bunch of the files to have .JPG extensions, and see whether Windows Explorer or macOS Finder previews them for you.

There are a few approaches for digging into what's there in bulk. You mentioned using iPhone Backup Extractor, and there's a guide on how a use "Bulk Rename Utility" to read backup data when in this situation.