IPhone – How to selectively restore save game data from old iphone backup

backupicloudiphonemergerestore

Here's the dilemma: My nephew decided to start a new game on GTA vice city which wiped out my hard worked progress. I have the progress in an old backup from a year ago. However, I would like to not lose the data I have from other apps.

What I have: iPhone5 iOS 9.3.1

What I have tried: iExplorer and iPhoneBackupBrowser

Story of my attempts: I have found the GTA data in iExplorer and have saved to my desktop. However, the app doesn't have iTunes file sharing enabled so I cannot replace the existing files in the "documents" for the app from the backup. I have also tried to downgrade the iPhone to iOS 8.3 but as the ipsw is unsigned, I cannot downgrade.

So:
What is the best way to achieve this? I could restore the phone from the old backup and then backup only the GTA app to iCloud, the restore the phone from the recent backup and then sync with the cloud. However, I feel that it will simply wipe out all other apps and only restore the one selected app. Is that correct? What other options do I have? Could I merge the backups somehow? Could I do this via iTunes sync where the data of the correct GTA savegame is synced and replaces the unwanted data?

Could I swap the files in the iTunes backup folder with the relevant files from the historical iTunes backup folder and then restore the modified backup to the phone?

Any pointers in the right direction will help.

Best Answer

I found the answer with iMazing https://imazing.com .

  • What I did was copy the entire iTunes backup folder from my USB drive to the iTunes backup folder in my machine.
  • Then I ran the iMazing App and went to the iOS App (app has to be installed) in the connected phone.
  • Then I right clicked the iOS App and select extract.
  • At this point, I selected extract from current backup (which would be the historical backup containing the app data I want to restore) and saved the extract file to my desktop.
  • Once done, I select "manage apps > restore" from the bottom of the screen and select the file I just extracted.
  • Phone restarted after restore and it was all restored perfectly!

If you get stuck, they are very responsive on twitter, which is where I got help to do this.

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