How to access iTune's backup of the iPhone

[chronos]

I recently damaged my iPhone's boot secuence. It seems one of the many applications I installed screwed something up and resulted in my iPhone rebooting again and again.
The firmware at this point was 1.1.3 installed by the official dev team upgrade.

At this point, I managed to back up my data by syncing with iTunes. After this, I restored to 1.1.4 and used Ziphone to activate/jailbreak/unlock.
Finally, I restored my backup to the new firmware.

The problem is that not all the information got back into the phone. I got everything but contacts and calendar info...

So, I guess my question is how do I manually access the itune's backed up data?
I've read the contacts and SMSs are in SQLite format INSIDE the phone. What about the itune's back up? So far I couldn't open anything with database readers.

I got Linux and Windows boxes, but I don't have access to a Mac.
Any ideas? Do you know any software to access this back up?

Thanks in advance.

[Aiyo]

well i wouldn't know what to tell ya. I never knew where the contacts and calender and stuff like that were backed up to. But if u had a mac thats a different story.

[chronos]

When syncing with iTunes, all SMSs, contacts, calendar, notes, safari bookmarks and even photographs get backed up. I would risk to say that after restoring a back up, the phone is exactly the same way it was before restoring the firmware, with exception of all the software previously installed (of course ).

I have seen Mac programs that can decode this iTunes backup, but as I previously stated, I don't have access to a Mac.

Is there any solution?
I have even tried to virtualize Mac OS X for intel, with no luck. I have tried VMware and Virtual Box. Perhaps someone here can point me in the right direction? What version of Mac OS should I install?

[omh44]

Here's something about restoring the backup..not sure if this helps

iPhone and iPod touch: About backups

[chronos]

I found out the hard way, that in order to backup your things, you only need to manually copy certain "Database" files from your iphone. The are located in
/User/Library

And you will find here the "SMS" folder that contains a "sms.db" file, the "AddressBook" folder that contains several database files, and every other piece of data on your phone.

Just copy all the folders you want to backup, and paste them after a firmware upgrade in the same place. Just watch out for noting the file's and folder's permissions, so as to configure them correctly after you paste them.

Hope this becomes useful to someone.