Howto: Restore Springboard icon positions after iTunes botches them

You’re syncing from another computer. You’re restoring from a backup. iTunes has a bad day. Whatever reason, iTunes decided to resync all your apps, and replace them in your springboard in alphabetical order. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that particularly helpful. I don’t know *how* many times I’ve meticulously sorted at least the three first Springboard pages with my most often used apps (which doesn’t sound like much, but *damn* does that UI suck!).

Expert instructions
Get your ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist from your old device or a backup, and replace the plist on your new device or new install. Nothing of much importance is in that file, so it should be fine to just replace. If you’re worried, just open the two files in Property List Editor and copy the array over; it’s just an array of array of application identifiers under the keypath iconState.iconLists. Respring/`killall SpringBoard` when done.

Noobie instructions
Scenario: You have a recent backup of your phone/pod/pad in Time Machine. You have your device with the botched icon ordering. You want to fix things.

1. Make a backup of your device. This way, we will know relatively certainly which backup belongs to this particular device.
2. In Finder, navigate to your home folder > Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backups
3. Sort by Modified, newest at the top. The topmost one (something like “74e39ee0ac6b69af6f57e213cf5c6b95e5fd787f”, perhaps longer and with dashes) will be your device’s backup. Move this one to your desktop.
4. Enter Time Machine for this folder. Restore the folder you moved away before to yesterday’s version or something
5. Download the iPhone Backup Extractor app
6. Open that app, click the button, choose the name of your device with the most recent date, and confirm
7. At the bottom, there is an “iPhone OS Files” entry. Extract this to your desktop.
8. Now, your device need to be jailbroken. If it isn’t already, get Spirit JB, run it, and jailbreak your device (it’ll only take seconds)
9. If you just jailbroke your device, or if you don’t have SSH enabled, go into Cydia on your device, wait for it to restart, and then install OpenSSH. You must change your default password, or bad things will invariably happen.
10. Get Transmit or another good SFTP client.
11. Make sure you’re on the same wifi as your device.
12. In your SFTP client, connect to (name of your device, with spaces replaced with dashes).local. My device is called Canvas, so I connected to Canvas.local. The connection method should be SFTP, the username should be ‘mobile’, and the password is your mobile password, as changed above or previously. By default it is 'alpine’, but you REALLY SHOULD NOT USE THIS PASSWORD, as it means anyone can connect to your phone, and e g read and send SMSes.
13. You’ll end up in your mobile user’s home folder. Navigate to Library > Preferences.
14. From your desktop, get the file iPhone OS Files > Library > Preferences > com.apple.springboard.plist, and upload and replace the one on your device.
15. Respring or reboot the device. Icon positions should be restored.

I haven’t tested the noobie instructions; just mail me at joachimb@gmail.com if they don’t work and we’ll figure it out.