What is the iPhone backup password?
The backup password is the password that locks your iPhone's backups. Chatcove needs encryption turned on because WhatsApp only puts your message history inside an encrypted backup. By default Chatcove chooses a strong password for you and saves it on your Mac, so you never have to type it.
Everything stays on your Mac. The password is never uploaded.
Why an encrypted backup is required
Section titled "Why an encrypted backup is required"An iPhone backup can be locked with a password. This is an Apple feature that you can also turn on in Finder (or iTunes). WhatsApp stores its message database in an encrypted backup only, never in an unencrypted one. So Chatcove cannot read your history without it.
If backup encryption was already on before you installed Chatcove, it was turned on earlier in Finder, iTunes or another tool. In that case Chatcove needs that existing password rather than choosing a new one. See If you already use a backup password in Finder.
What Chatcove does for you
Section titled "What Chatcove does for you"On the Backup encryption card, Chatcove shows one of these states:
| Pill on the card | What it means |
|---|---|
| Off | Encryption is off on the iPhone. Click Turn on encryption. Chatcove sets a strong password, and the iPhone asks for its passcode once to confirm. |
| On and verified | Encryption is on and Chatcove has a password that is proven to open the backup. You are ready to back up. |
| On, not verified | Chatcove has a saved password, but no backup has confirmed it yet. Your first backup confirms it automatically. |
| Password needed | Encryption is on, but it was set outside Chatcove and Chatcove does not have the password. You enter it. |
| Password mismatch | Chatcove 0.1.7 or later. The saved password no longer matches the iPhone's backups. See The saved password does not match. |
When Chatcove turns encryption on itself, it generates a long random password: 25 letters and digits in five groups of five joined by hyphens, with look-alike characters (0, O, 1, l, I) left out. You are not asked to choose or remember it.
Where the password is saved
Section titled "Where the password is saved"The password is saved on this Mac only, one entry per iPhone. It is encrypted with macOS (the Keychain-backed secure store that Electron's safeStorage uses) and written to a small file called backup-passwords.json in Chatcove's data folder:
~/Library/Application Support/Chatcove/backup-passwords.jsonThat file holds only the encrypted password plus a few labels (who set it, whether it is verified, and when it was saved). The plain password is never written to disk and never appears in logs or problem reports.
Your iPhone backups live in a backups folder next to it by default:
~/Library/Application Support/Chatcove/backups/You can move the backup location to another drive in Settings, Storage.
Finder and Chatcove share one setting
Section titled "Finder and Chatcove share one setting"Backup encryption is a setting on the iPhone, so Finder and Chatcove see the same on or off state. Because the saved password belongs to this Mac, a second Mac does not know it. See Using Chatcove on two Macs.
Chatcove has no screen that shows the generated password. If you also want to use Finder backups with a password you know, reset the backup password on the iPhone (Forgot your iPhone backup password?), set your own in Finder, then give that password to Chatcove as described on the Finder page.