Backup from iPhone on Linux without iTunes

Is it possible to back up short messages from an iPhone on Linux, without iTunes?

Yes, you can use the libimobiledevice project to backup your iPhone.

The project website is: http://www.libimobiledevice.org

However, most Linux distributions have it available in their package managers for easy installation.

After you have libimobiledevice installed, run idevicebackup2 to take a backup of the short message and other data from the phone:

idevicebackup2 backup myfolder

where myfolder is a path to a folder, where you want to store the backup.

If you neeed to enter passwords, you'll want to run it as:

idevicebackup2 -i backup myfolder

where -i means to ask for passwords interactively.

To then browse the backup in a traditional file tree format run:

idevicebackup2 unback myfolder

or

idevicebackup2 -i unback myfolder

A thorough guide can be found at this link.