Saturday, June 27, 2026

Recovering missing Voice Memos from iPod touch backup – files exist on device but not in backup/export

I’m trying to recover ~650 Voice Memos from an iPod touch 6 (iOS 12.5.8 (16H88)).

On the device itself, all recordings are visible in the Voice Memos app and play fine. However, many of them have no name (the title field is blank, but the date shows underneath), Not sure if it was always like that, or if an update or something corrupted it.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

  • In the filesystem (/Recordings), there are only ~440 .m4a files

  • The remaining ~200 recordings do NOT exist as separate .m4a files

  • In the Voice Memos app, all ~650 recordings are still present and playable

What I’ve tried:

  • iTunes Backup Explorer – only finds the ~440 named .m4a files in the filesystem MediaDomain/Media/Recordings (it also doesnt keep real filenames anyway)

  • 3uTools – When I try to click the Voice Memos, it says "limited by iOS version" The file system also only shows the same 440 .m4a files as the other Explorers.

  • iMazing – this was the only program that seemed to recognize all the files, in the voice memo export mode. The problem is that when I tried to export it, each of the blank files defaults to be named the same as the date. Therefore, after each export, it asks me if I want to replace or cancel the operation since they are duplicate filenames. (No option to save both.)

  • A whole bunch of other tools that saw the same as these programs or even less . Many of them don’t even show you the total file count, so I can’t even tell 100% if they had the full amount or not.

I tried a lot of other ways to get to the files, but there seems to be no normal way to batch share them or iCloud backup. This storage is full all the way, so can’t even do an iOS update, without having to delete a lot of things. But don’t even know if that will help or make things worse.

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