iMessage database not found in iPhone backup

[michenator19]

Starting a new discussion from my question on another thread. Seems that in my standard iOS backup, imessage-exporter is not finding the iMessages database in the expected place. I'm seeing others have this problem in various other contexts, but the answer was that the backup was encrypted. In my case the backup is not encrypted.

Here is the command I put in:

imessage-exporter -f html -p ~/Desktop/iphone_backup_latest/00008101-001A15682644001E -a iOS -c compatible -o ~/Desktop/iMessages1

Here is the response I get back:

Invalid configuration: Database not found at /Users/michele/Desktop/iphone_backup_latest/00008101-001A15682644001E/3d/3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28

iPhone 12 mini is running iOS 17.5.1 and MacBook Air is running Sonoma 14.6.1. I used the step-by-step from this Reddit comment to install (subbing out ReagentX instead of aaronkelly, which did not work) and the step-by-step from this Github comment to understand how to tweak for iOS backup. Happy to share any other details! Thank you!

[ReagentX]

I wouldn't follow the steps in that Reddit post; it looks AI generated and incorrect. All you need to to do install it is follow the steps here.

imessage-exporter/imessage-database/src/tables/table.rs

Lines 76 to 80 in 511d17d

	// File is missing
	Err(TableError::CannotConnect(format!(
	"Database not found at {}",
	&path.to_str().unwrap_or("Unknown")
	)))

To better diagnose, can you show me the output when you run ls -la ~/Desktop/iphone_backup_latest? Also, can you try running imessage-exporter without the -a flag? It should automatically detect if the database is from an iOS or macOS device, but the output may help us understand what is going wrong.

[michenator19]

Deeply embarrassing and so sorry for the time waste but I figured out the issue was a silly typo in my folder name. Closed this discussion, but feel free to delete! Thank you for this program, it's incredible!