How to Unlock and Reset an iPhone Backup Password

When you create a local backup of an iOS device and save it to your computer’s hard drive, you have the ability to encrypt it with a password. This ability secures your backup — others won’t be able to access the data contained within without your password — and it allows you to include sensitive information such as passwords, Health and HomeKit data to be included within the file.

But while this ability may safeguard your data — it could be too good at its job. If you lose or forget your encryption password, for example, there’s no option to retrieve it. Counter-intuitively, you can’t reset the encryption with a new password without the original. If you’re at this point, the only way to choose a new password is to delete all of the old backups and start fresh.

Of course, if that’s not going to help you, there is one other option: a password cracker that will use brute force to guess the password — since there’s no limit to the amount of times an incorrect password can be entered into the field. Unfortunately, iTunes password crackers are generally only available for Windows PC — so if you’re on a Mac, follow these steps first (assuming you have a PC to borrow or use). If you’re a Windows user, start at Step 6.

1. Open iTunes > Preferences.
2. Click on the Devices menu.
3. Find the backup whose password you want to crack, right-click and hit Show in Finder.
4. In Finder, search for a file named “manifest.plist” — make sure you’re only searching within the particular backup folder.
5. Copy (don’t move) the file to a USB flash drive, DropBox folder, or another means of transferring it to a different computer.

Once you do that, you can start the password cracking process on your PC. There are quite a few iTunes password cracking apps available, but Tenorshare’s Backup Unlocker is lightweight, easy-to-use and well-rated.

6. Download and install iPhone Backup Unblocker on your PC.
7. Open the application.
8. Once it’s open, click the blue Add button.
9. The program will detect backups automatically, but to ensure you’re unlocking the right one, click Import and navigate to the folder your manifest.plist file is located in (on your flash drive, or in a Downloads folder if you downloaded it from DropBox, for example).
10. Once it’s imported, you should see your device name in the field. Now you can start the cracking process.
11. If you don’t have the slightest clue what your password could be, select Brute Force Attack. This will try different combinations of numbers, letters and characters — and it could take quite a while, depending on the length and complexity of your password.
12. Alternatively, if you know which numbers or characters you typically use, you can customize the password cracking via the Settings menu next to Brute Force with Mask Attack.

At some point, the app will successfully guess your password — in first-hand testing, this has worked on several passwords with mixed uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. Though, if your password is extremely long or complex, there are no guarantees as to how long the process will take.

On a side note, once the app guesses your password, you’ll have to buy the full version to actually see it. It costs $49.95, which, honestly, is pretty expensive. But if your encrypted backup contains extremely important, sensitive or sentimental data, this is one way to go that’ll work — especially when there aren’t many other options to unlock a backup.