Retreiving all your iPhone Files (including voice mail)

So I wanted to save some important voicemails from my iPhone along with some other files to my Windows 7 PC. As you may know you can only get a few file types using iTunes. I typically use iTools (http://www.itools.cn/multi_lang_pc_download.htm) most of the time. It's free and is nice program. However, it didn't seem to have the ability to extract voice mail files. Thus starting my search for a different tool.

There are several tools available that seemed to be able to do it, but they weren't free or even cheap for what I needed. I found that if I used iTunes (v11.1) to backup my phone that all the files are saved to the directory C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\. Within that folder is a large number of files without extensions or even names that make any sense. I tried adding a .mp4 extension to a few of the largest files. I was able to play them in a media player. So...the files seem to be there, but without extension.

Folder with files without extenstions.

Problem: How do identify the file types of missing file extensions?

I had more that 3,000 files and I wasn't about to try renaming each file until I found the voice mail files I wanted. Hmmm....maybe paying for the other software tools is sounding like the better option. Not so fast...I found a command line tool called  TrID that can identify unknown files or files without extensions based on their binary signatures. It includes a feature to rename those files based on the identified extensions. Sounds promising.

Here's how to put it all together.

1. Backup your iPhone with iTunes.
2. Locate your backup directory within: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\
3. Download TrID and the TrID definitions located at the bottom of the product page.
4. Make a copy of your iTunes backup folder from above just in case. Not sure if this is necessary, but didn't want to mess up the original files
5. Extract the TrID and TrID definitions file into the same directory. I extracted them to my phone backup.
6. Open a command window and cd to your backup directory. There you execute the command "trid * -ce" to identify and rename all files.

Here's the final results. All files (except a few) now have file extensions including the voice mail files (*.amr).