Get your data
off your iPhone, properly.

iPhones are walled gardens on purpose. Apple would prefer you keep everything inside Apple — which is fine right up until you need to leave with your own data. Switching to Android, preserving messages from someone important, archiving photos with their real dates, exporting contacts to a different system: all of this should be easy, and Apple makes all of it hard.

OpenExtract does one job: it reads the backup files your computer already has, and gives you the contents back as normal files. It's free, open source, and nothing leaves your machine.

The general flow

1. Make a backup on your computer (Finder on Mac, iTunes on Windows). Encrypted, if you want everything.
2. Install OpenExtract (free).
3. Open the backup. Pick what you want. Export. Files appear on your Desktop.

That's it. If you want the long version, see how it works.