The iPhone Backup Extractor is a tool which allows you to browse the backups that iTunes makes every time you connect your iPhone to sync. This can be helpful if you need to take a peek inside the Library directory of your own application, or if you’re just curious about what else there is to look at.
For instance, if you unpack the entry labeled Other Files, and browse inside to Library/Notes you see a file called notes.db. This is an sqlite3 database containing any entries you’ve made within the Notes application on the iPhone. The Address Book, Calendar, CallHistory and SMS directories also contain sqlite3 databases.
CallHistory is particularly interesting, as it contains a table simply called call, which looks like:
CREATE TABLE call (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, address TEXT, date INTEGER, duration INTEGER, flags INTEGER, id INTEGER);
and mine contains entries such as:
327|+44123456789|1226245272|240|5|461
328|+44123456789|1226251236|60|5|461
So from this I can see that I’ve made 328 calls in total, and the last two calls were from Sunday during the late afternoon. The duration column seems to be rounded to the nearest 60 seconds, which is a little unhelpful.
You could conceivably write some software which regularly syncs all calls made to a master database, allowing you to track your phone usage to a reasonably granular level. This would also be possible for your text messages, as the SMS database also contains similarly useful information.
Tags: calls, extract, information, iPhone, logging, logs, sqlite3