iPhone: Backup your SpringBoard icon arrangement

I use a small icon theme called Matte Nano, plus fiveIrows and fiveIcolumns, so I can have as many as 25 icons per page on SpringBoard.

Sometimes the phone enters safe mode after a respring. This turns off all themes and customization and SpringBoard goes back to a 4x4, 16 icon arrangement. Respringing will take it out of safe mode, but the icons will still be in a 16 per page arrangement, and if you had more than 16 on a page, the extras will be scattered all over the place.

The icon arrangement is stored in /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist, so I wrote two scripts, one to back up that file, and another to restore it.

To back it up, simply cat the file and redirect the output to a backup file

#! /bin/sh
cat /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist > /var/mobile/springboardbackup

To restore, just cat the backup and redirect the output to the original. Everything will be back to normal after a respring.

#! /bin/sh
cat /var/mobile/springboardbackup > /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist

To use: save these files as backupsb and restoresb, do a chmod 775 on both, and run them in MobileTerminal when needed.