[jl6]

Apple keep their casual users on a short leash, but for those willing to tinker, iOS device backups are actually quite good for that archive use case, as you can extract most of your important data in the form of SQLite database files. The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking, but the fact that this route still exists at all is encouraging (in the sense that all hope is not yet lost). They could very easily have hidden all these files behind an Apple-managed encryption key. On the other hand, this niche affordance may serve to placate the power users who would be most likely to cause noise and revolt if our personal needs were not met. On the gripping hand, the device backup mechanism via iTunes feels so ancient that they probably just haven’t thought about it.

[prmph]

> The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking

Yeah, that's what I want to abstract way. There are tools that do this to some extent, but they stop at backup extraction, without helping you to integrate the extracted data into a proper personal digital library with easy retrieval.