DumpSock

Your first backup ​

GUI (macOS) ​

  1. Open DumpSock.app. The window opens maximised.
  2. Plug in your iPhone over USB. The Connected Device card on the Dashboard fills in within a couple seconds — name, model, iOS version, free / total storage.
  3. The Storage Overview donut shows what's eating space on your iPhone.
  4. By default DumpSock saves into ~/DumpSock/<your-phone-name>/. If you'd rather it land somewhere else (a fast external SSD, for example), click Change… under "Saves to" and pick a folder. The choice sticks for next time.
  5. Click the big red Back Up Now button.
  6. The view switches to Backup Progress. Watch the progress bar, the per-file stats, and the live filename. The first run of a phone with hundreds of photos can take a while — sit tight.
  7. When it's done, you get a notification on the Mac and the screen shows Done with how many files moved.
  8. Click Open the folder to see the date-sorted result in Finder.

CLI ​

bash
dumpsock pull

That's the common case. The defaults pull into ~/DumpSock/<device-name>/ with date folders. Useful flags:

bash
dumpsock pull -o /Volumes/SSD/iPhone           # explicit destination
dumpsock pull --since 2026-01-01               # only files from Jan 1 2026 onward
dumpsock pull --dry-run                        # plan only, don't transfer
dumpsock pull --watch 60                       # rescan every 60s and pull anything new
dumpsock pull --help                           # full flag list

What ends up on disk ​

~/DumpSock/iPhone/
├── 2026-05-15/
│   ├── IMG_0107.HEIC
│   ├── IMG_0107.MOV       ← Live Photo pair, same date folder
│   └── IMG_0108.MOV
├── 2026-05-14/
│   └── …
└── 0000:00:00 00:00:00/   ← files with no readable capture date
    └── …

The YYYY-MM-DD layout is the same one icloudpd uses — if you have an existing icloudpd backup, DumpSock can fill the same tree without duplicates (it skips files where the name + byte size already exist somewhere in the destination).