What’s the deal with these weird date entries in my backup?

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Asked By CuriousCat42 On

I lost an important app that I've been using and managed to back it up as a raw SQLite file. I'm trying to figure out the meaning behind some date entries in the backup but I'm stuck. The backup has a ZYEAR column that lists the year and a ZDATE column that's a 9-digit number, all ending with '00'. I've looked into it but can't determine how to translate this into a readable datetime format. Can anyone shed some light on what these entries mean? I'm especially puzzled by the correlation between the ZYEAR and ZDATE.

3 Answers

Answered By RewindRanger On

It appears what you’re seeing is indeed seconds measured from an epoch, which is standard for many Apple applications. Just to confirm, as you've noted, their specific epoch is 2001-01-01. If you adjust your calculations with that in mind, you should be able to accurately retrieve corresponding date times.

Answered By DataDiver83 On

It sounds like those numbers could be related to Apple's date system—maybe it's a countdown from a specific starting point instead of being standard timestamps. Some people have pointed out that the ZDATE might represent seconds since a certain epoch, like Apple's starting point of January 1, 2001. Have you checked if this aligns with other timestamps in your data? It might help make sense of the dates you have.

Answered By CodeMaster27 On

It’s pretty likely that you could be looking at a format where the first part is the year and the second part represents milliseconds since the start of that year. For example, your last date entry, '2025 760683600', might convert to around March 29 in early morning. Do you have any specific reference dates from the original app that could help double-check that?

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