I have an iPhone 11. From time to time it would be nice to be able to attach it to my network. Always a struggle.

The old Macbook Pro can only run High Sierra, and then only with some special jiggery-pokery. I can sometimes get iTunes on the Macbook to connect to the iPhone, and can usually figure out how to get data into some app using that, or to do a backup, but it is a hassle. The Windows 10 box with iTunes won’t connect to it at all, and (typical of Windows) won’t explain why. I really just want to mount it without all the fuss.

I found a guy on the net who claimed to be able to mount his iPhone on Arch, so I tried following his instructions, which basically involved installing a few libraries usbmuxd, libplist, libimobiledevice and ifuse, the last of which I had to install from AUR. That was easy enough.

Then reboot, plug in the iphone, and voila. It is detected.

I created a directory /ginger, and mounted it with ifuse /ginger, and Bob’s your uncle, I have access to its disk on Arch.

Then I checked on a whim whether I could do a backup. Sure enough libimobiledevice comes with idevicebackup2 which, supposedly, will do a backup of the device. Alas, it doesn’t work, complaining of a protocol mismatch, which according to the net means that the version 1.3.0-3 available on Arch is not the latest, and I need 1.3.1. The option is to download from git and compile from source.

This is low priority for me. I still can do an occasional backup on the Macbook, when I think of it, either locally or to iCloud, via iTunes. The local backup is stored in /Users/dee/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/backup and can be copied elsewhere by root. I don’t actually have much on the iPhone that needs a backup. Many people have their contacts and calendar exclusively on the phone, but I keep both my contacts and calendar in radicale on my server and connect to them from everywhere.

I may eventually do this if there comes a time the backups become important. For now I’ll just wait till a later version shows up in Arch.