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Let me explain my situation. I jailbroke my iPhone 4 when the untethered 4.3.1 jailbreak got released last week. As precaution, I did make a backup of my Cydia apps back when it was 4.2.1 and my iPhone's personal data as well. When I restored the Cydia apps it had to remove my phone's apps. The problem is when I restore my iPhone data back on, it does not restore all of my apps due to it being over capacity. And thus I don't have my app's data.

So, I want to remove the photos and movies from my iPhone's backup as they eat up most of the phone's memory. Is there a way? Or is there another solution to handle this problem?

What I did so far
Remove any large Cydia apps. Still over capacity.

iTunes ver. 10.2.1 Mac OS 10.6.7 iPhone iOS 4.3.1

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Well since you are using Mac OSX, when you plug in your phone you can do the following to back up your pictures OUTSIDE of iTunes.

Step 1

Open up Preview with your phone plugged in. Go to File > Import Image. You will see it populate all your photos/videos. Save them in a separate folder (maybe somewhere on your desktop), then delete them all from your phone.

If you are concerned about mass deleting these files, you can just do it with SSH. This is after you've imported all your images through preview.

From Terminal on your desktop type 

ssh root@your-iphones-ip-address-here

Will prompt you with a PW, chances are if you haven't changed it it's alpine or Alpine. Change directories via the following command: 

cd /var/mobile/Media/DCIM

Depending on the amount of images/videos you have you will see 100APPLE/ and maybe 101APPLE/. In the directory type this to remove ALL images and movies in one command

rm -r 100APPLE/ 
rm -r 101APPLE/

Backup in iTunes now and you have a fresh backup with just numbers/apps/whatever else. You can then import the pictures/videos back if you want after you restore it.

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  • That is some great tips! I will save this for when I make future backups. As for right now, I want to remove movie/photo data from an existing backup. I thought of a workaround but it would require me to un-jailbreak my phone and then make a new backup using your method.
    – Tsitra360
    Apr 6, 2011 at 21:36

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