Choosing your backup folder

Peak is a sandboxed Mac App Store app. By design it can read only the one folder you explicitly point it at — it has no access to the rest of your disk. The first time you open Peak, it asks you to choose your iPhone backup folder. You do this once.

Why Peak asks

iPhone backups live at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/. A sandboxed app can't open that folder on its own; you grant access by selecting it yourself. This is a deliberate privacy boundary: Peak literally cannot look anywhere you don't choose.

Step 1 — Open Peak

On first launch, Peak shows a "Choose your iPhone backup folder" screen with a Choose Backup Folder… button.

Step 2 — Select your backup folder

1. Click Choose Backup Folder…
2. The file picker opens at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
3. Select the Backup folder (it contains one folder per device, each named with a long ID), or a specific device's backup folder inside it
4. Click Grant Access

macOS remembers your choice (via a security-scoped bookmark), so you won't be asked again on later launches. Peak then shows your iPhone backups in the left sidebar.

What Peak reads

Only what's inside the folder you selected:

• sms.db and the message attachments for the threads you scan
• AddressBook.sqlitedb from the backup itself, to resolve phone numbers to contact names — Peak never touches the Mac's own Contacts app

Peak reads nothing else on your Mac — it can't, because it's sandboxed. There's no analytics, no telemetry, and (because it ships through the App Store) no network calls at all.

Removing access

Drag Peak to the Trash. A sandboxed app's folder grants are tied to the app, so removing the app removes its access to your backup.

Next: Working with Encrypted Backups or skip to Reading the Report.