Backing Up an Iphone Using libimobiledevice and idevicebackup2

Published by John on October 27, 2022 Under Computer Repair

Recently, I needed to make a backup of an iPhone, but was getting an error when using idevicebackup2, which is part of the libimobiledevice library and allows for communication between an iPhone and a computer running Linux.

Specifically, when I attempted a backup using idevicebackup2, I got the following error:

Could not perform backup protocol version exchange, error code -1

After some research, I found several threads, which indicated the most recent version of libimobiledevice fixed this issue. Since I was already tried using the most recent version of libimobiledeviceis available in Fedora and Centos, I decided to try building it locally.

In order to build it, I had to first install some dependencies via my packagemanager: openssl-devel, make, gcc-c++, and a few other basics when for building a file.

Then, I needed to install some updated libimobiledevice libraries: libusbmuxd, libplist, libimobiledevice-glue

Note, that when installing these, I had to manually specify the location of the newly installed packages like this:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh

After this, I was able to install libimobiledevice and preform a backup with idevicebackup2.

The basic installation process was:

git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libplist.git
cd libplist
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libusbmuxd.git
cd libusbmuxd
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice-glue.git
cd libimobiledevice-glue
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice.git
cd libimobiledevice
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

Then to run the command, I did the following: /usr/local/bin/idevicebackup2 backup backup/

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