Upon opening iBooks.app on my clean Mavericks install, I noticed that all my ebooks from other sources than the iBooks Store were missing. Of course, they're not saved in iCloud. So I wanted to restore them from the Music/iTunes Media/Books folder of my Time Machine backup. On my backup disk, there was no Music folder.. I forgot I had excluded it from the backup. I wanted to save space, and I'm using iTunes Match anyway, but I hadn't thought about the books.
All the books and PDFs were still on my iOS devices, which started syncing with iTunes immediately and deleted all books in the process instead of transferring them to my Mac.
Finally I had a look at the MobileSync folder on the backup disk. The backup seems to be some kind of database. I used grep
to search for a few unique terms from my books in the binaries, and they are indeed in there, somewhere.
I've tried to copy the folder to my Mac so I can look at the backup with iExplorer, but it doesn't show any books. Which app can I use to simply extract the books from the backups?