[prpl]

I had done something too, but I also needed a Manifest.mbdb parser to reconstruct backup to disk, then process the messages and copy all the images around to make it work. I did it mostly to make a simple-to-read archive of chats before deleting them.

[judge2020]

Did your work turn into some potentially sharable shell scripts, perhaps? Would be a useful tool to avoid having to store messages in iCloud.

[prpl]

I have not used it for a very long time, so I can't comment to how well it works.

That said, this is it: https://gist.github.com/brianv0/35f36a32366a2c34be8d

(You need an unencrypted backup directory to run it over)

Note: It looks like the flat directory structure of the backup is now 256 dirs prefixed by first two characters of file name. I'm not sure, but a small change to the name "sha_file" may be needed to just path.join that with the first two chars of the sha.

[prpl]

couple of extra hints:

Python 2 but can be ported forward without much effort. Manifest.mbdb is now Manifest.plist (there's a sqlite thing now too). timestamp sql might not work so great, would need to check query.