Tasks & Workflows

Day to day, you do five things with Apple Juicer: discover new backups, unlock encrypted ones, browse and download, index artifacts, and occasionally purge data. Each maps to an endpoint you can also drive from a script.

Discovering backups

1. Make sure backups exist under APPLE_JUICER_BACKUP_PATHS__BASE_PATH.
2. Call POST /backups/refresh (or click Refresh in the UI) to rescan.
3. New backups are inserted and existing ones updated in Postgres, with size, device name, and encryption flag.

If backups arrive regularly, run the refresh on a schedule.

Unlocking and sessions

1. Enter the encryption passphrase in the UI.
2. POST /backups/{id}/unlock hands it to UnlockManager, which uses iphone-backup-decrypt to open the keybag and Manifest.
3. The response carries a session_token and a TTL. Send it as X-Backup-Session on the manifest and file routes.
4. To revoke early, call POST /backups/{id}/lock. It is idempotent.

Sessions live in memory, so restarting the backend clears them.

Browsing and downloading

1. Page through manifest entries with GET /backups/{id}/files, filtering by domain and path_like and paging with limit and offset.
2. Stream a file with GET /backups/{id}/file/{file_id}, sending both the API and session headers. The backend deletes the temporary copy as soon as the response finishes.

Indexing artifacts

1. Decrypting a backup enqueues index_backup_job for it.
2. The worker parses the artifact databases and writes the normalized tables and the search index.
3. When it finishes, the backup’s status becomes INDEXED and the artifact tabs light up.

To re-index, enqueue another job. The worker truncates the previous rows first, so you always end up with consistent data.

Purging data

• Drop the decrypted copy with DELETE /backups/{id}/decrypted. The encrypted backup stays put.
• Remove a backup’s rows by deleting it in Postgres; ON DELETE CASCADE cleans up every related artifact automatically.
• Empty the queue with rq empty default.
• Clear stale temp folders under backup_paths.temp_path if the backend ever crashed mid-download.

Automating it

A few endpoints lend themselves to a cron job or a watcher:

• Scheduled refresh — curl -s -X POST http://localhost:8080/backups/refresh -H "X-API-Token: $TOKEN" on a timer.
• Re-index on change — dispatch jobs for recently modified backups overnight.
• Watch for new backups — trigger the refresh the moment a new backup lands on the host.