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Here's what I would like to do, if you know of a clever way to pull this off please let me know.

I need to access voicemail files (.arm) on my iPhone. It is not currently jailbroken. To complicate matters I upgraded my text plan tonight. Unknown to me at the time when they upgrade your text plan it causes you to have to reactivate your voicemail. So upgrading my text plan caused me to lose all of my voicemails.

My hope is that the .arm files are still on the filesystem. The reason I am even spending the effort to find a way to retrieve them is because a few of these voicemails are very important to me and I was going to record them to my computer this weekend to save them.

It's my understanding that using any of the jailbreak apps causes a full restore of the phone and therefore would erase the existing data, including the .arm files I am trying to retrieve.

I found an application called iPhoneBrowser, though it crashes each time I run it. I tried several versions. Plus I believe it will not get me access to the areas of the filesystem that I need since my phone is not already jailbroken.

Is there a clever way to access the filesystem or somehow find and transfer the voicemail files?

Note: I have an iPhone 2.5G with OS version 3.0.

Thank you

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5 Answers 5

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I have used the application PhoneView to pull a voicemail off my non-jailbroken phone. It is a $20 application, but the demo mode will let you save voicemail.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/25347/phoneview

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  • This worked perfectly, amazing! Thank you!!! Nov 22, 2009 at 17:20
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blackra1n doesn't cause a full restore of the phone and then will allow you to access all areas of the iPhone.

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Does iTunes synchronize those voicemail files in your iPhone? If so, you may try to locate the .arm files through iPhone Backup Extractor.

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OK. I'm going to save your butt here. You know that there is a way to jailbreak your phone without having to do a restore, right? Yes, there is.

It is called blackra1n and you can get it here. It is available for both mac and windows.

After you follow the instructions and jailbreak your device go into whatever app management system you chose to install (Cydia or Rock or Icy). Install the openSSH package and make sure you turn it on. Put your phone on your wireless network and check what it's IP address is. Go onto the PC (make sure it is on the same network as the phone) that you want to transfer the voicemails to and run an SSH client there. Use the IP of the iPhone as the host, root as the username, and alpine as the password.

In the SSH client, navigate to:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/

Copy all the files out of there onto your computer and you should be good to go. Let me know how it works out for you.

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  • How does one un-jailbreak their phone? Nov 22, 2009 at 16:49
  • You can make a backup on iTunes right before you jailbreak. Then jailbreak the phone and extract the files. After you are done with needing the jailbreak just use iTunes to restore from the backup. When you restore backups iTunes kills the jailbreak. Honestly, I would keep it. I got my first iPhone when it came out, I jailbroke it back then but when 2.0 came out with the iTunes store I got rid of the jailbreak. A couple of months ago I needed to do something I couldn't do without jailbreaking. I have left it jailbroken since then, and it has helped me out so many times. It's worth it.
    – Marcin
    Nov 22, 2009 at 21:23
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Our company had a lot of trouble with this; at first, we could not find any available C#/.NET library to do this. We ended up writing our own library using external library calls, but it had numerous stability issues and we gave up. Eventually, we found a library that provided a very good code base: MK.Mobile.Device.Lite

The documentation is scarce, but the code is quite self-explanatory; the library provides LOTS of functions for accessing iDevices over a USB cable, and the project maintainer stated that network capabilities may become available in the foreseeable future.

We have incorporated this great open source library into many of our applications, and the implementation is quite simple: you register an event that fires when a device is plugged in/unplugged, and you can call your code on those events.

The functions are extensive, allowing code to fetch many different aspects of the device. If you contact them, there is a version of the library that is even more powerful than the free libary; however it is not open source.

Good luck using this library. We have had great success, and have been able to use it in many of our applications.

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