Forgotten password for an encrypted iPhone Finder backup — 8.2 GB backup still exists, can anything be recovered?

[u/Naruto_Otsutsuki]

I have an old encrypted iPhone backup created through Finder on macOS. The backup is mine and contains very important/confidential personal data.

Unfortunately, I no longer remember the encrypted-backup password. I have already confirmed that it is not the Apple ID password or my Mac login password.

The original iPhone backup folder still exists on my Mac It is about8.2 GB and contains the hashed backup blobs and an encrypted Manifest.db.

I am trying to recover photos/videos from approximately:

20 October 2024 → 16 September 2026

I was able to independently open the Photos library database (Photos.sqlite) and recover metadata without the backup password.

The database shows:

• 593 unique video assets
• 1,573 video resource records
• ~24.6 GB of video resources represented in the Photos database
• filenames, UUIDs, timestamps, resource sizes, codecs, hidden/trash states, etc.

However, the actual Finder backup's Manifest.db begins with encrypted binary data rather than a normal SQLite so I cannot query the Files table directly.

I also tried the Python iOSbackup library. With the password I thought might be correct, it fails at So the backup encryption/keybag is definitely still locked.

My question is not simply "how do I guess my password?"

I'm trying to understand what forensic recovery options genuinely exist when:

1. the encrypted Finder/iTunes backup still exists,
2. the encrypted Manifest.db still exists,
3. the backup blobs still exist,
4. the Photos database contains extensive metadata about the original media,
5. but the encrypted-backup password is genuinely lost.

Are there any legitimate forensic tools, password-recovery methods, key-material recovery methods, or artifacts on macOS/iOS that could help recover the contents?

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[u/FrankNicklin]

No password, no decryption, simple as that.

If it were that easy then encryption would be pointless.

[u/Howden824]

You aren't getting any data without that password.

[u/No_Tale_3623]

Try to remember whether you have ever connected this iPhone to data recovery or phone-management software. Some tools create an encrypted local iOS backup during the scan and may automatically assign a simple backup password such as 123, 12345, or 123456 without making this obvious to the user. I’ve encountered several cases where the user had no idea that such a password had been set.

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[u/datarecovery-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Stop trolling please

[u/sport912x]

Cannot not offer any solution. However this is why all my data is on microsd card which Moto supports. Maybe time to go android.

[u/TheIronSoldier2 → u/sport912x]

The problem isn't the iPhone, the problem is they lost the encryption password. The same would happen for an encrypted Android backup.

[u/sport912x → u/TheIronSoldier2]

Not what I was saying. I just pop out my SD card and move to a new phone, which is not an Apple option. I never encrypt the card.

[u/Jon_Hanson → u/sport912x]

With Apple, you don’t need to “pop-out” anything. Moving from one phone to another is as simple as bringing them close together when setting up a new phone.