I do some serious PDF hoarding in the iBooks app on my iPhone. Calendars, e-books, flyers, things I loved reading and want to read again, things I want to love reading someday in the future... it's all there in a flurry of mismatched PDF previews. It would be pretty sad to lose all my PDFs from iBooks, so today's blog post is about how to backup PDFs from iBooks.
Back in the day (circa 2014), PDF files saved to iBooks were part of a normal iPhone backup, but that is no longer the case. Since PDF files can now be synced to iBooks on your iOS device, they're now categorized as "synced stuff" and "synced stuff" doesn't get backed up. (If that is an interesting sentence to you, you may enjoy this post about iTunes sync vs iTunes backup.) Let me make sure I state this clearly: PDFs in iBooks are NOT backed up as part of an iPhone backup in iTunes. If you don't believe me, here's a reference :).
A few notes:
If you're using iTunes on Windows, and can't find the File menu, try pressing Ctrl+B on your keyboard to un-hide it. (The menu is no longer hidden on iTunes 12.4 and higher.)
If you're on Mac, you may need to open the iBooks app on your Mac once and login there. I needed to do this back in 2015, but I haven't gotten a new computer and needed to repeat the experiment again yet.
A few people told me that the PDFs didn't transfer until doing a second transfer purchases. So definitely verify the PDFs copied, and if not, try try again.
If you use iBooks with iCloud drive, the PDFs that are stored in iCloud drive do not transfer to your computer. We've also seen some reports (see the comments below) that the PDFs in iCloud drive may be mislabled in your iBooks app, showing they're not stored in iCloud Drive, when they really are. Update June 29, 2017 see the section below about accessing the PDFs downloaded from iCloud on macOS Sierra and higher.
On Windows, the iBooks PDF files copied to your iTunes by doing Transfer Purchases are stored in your computer user's account folder, alongside your iTunes music. Here's how to find your iBooks PDFs on your Windows computer:
On Mac, the iBooks PDFs copied by doing Transfer Purchases are tucked away in data for the iBooks Mac App. Here's how to find your iBooks PDFs on your Mac:
On macOS Sierra and higher, if you've signed into the macOS iBooks app, your PDFs are actually available through the iCloud Drive section of your "Mobile Documents" folder. (It's likely already there before you ever open the iBooks app, as long as you've signed in to your iCloud account on your Mac.)
First, we need to make sure you've got iBooks turned on for your iCloud drive documents on your Mac.
Now, the iCloud Drive container for iBooks doesn't normally show up in Finder, so we have to manually open it in Finder using Terminal.
open ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks
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