Can I backup an iMessage thread?

October 9, 2022 3:35 PM

There are some iMessage conversations that I never want to lose. Is there a way of backing them up to my own storage instead hoping I never inadvertently delete the conversation?

What it says on the tin. Free is better, but some of these conversations are important to me, and I’d pay. I have both a Mac and iOS devices so a solution in either configuration would be fine. Can it be done?

posted by AMyNameIs to Technology (6 answers total)

Best answer: It's not free, but iMazing lets you do this (and a lot of other things). IME it works pretty well.
posted by aubilenon at 4:03 PM on October 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

On the Mac you can print the conversation to a PDF, and then backup the PDF in the usual fashion. I've done this, was very simple and straightforward.

Of course, this will be the conversation at a particular point in time, so you'd have to do this on a regular basis if you want to capture messages over the long haul.
posted by Frayed Knot at 5:47 PM on October 9, 2022

Best answer: I used PhoneView successfully
posted by mcgsa at 5:53 PM on October 9, 2022

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try out the two programs. Interesting that both require me to connect my phone to the computer. I had expected that it would get messages directly from the cloud backup.

If anyone has other suggestions, I'll be checking this thread again
posted by AMyNameIs at 8:19 PM on October 9, 2022

If the conversation that you want to keep is complete and not terribly long, screen shots are a quick-and-easy way to keep a record.
posted by heatherlogan at 6:25 AM on October 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Since you have a Mac, you can backup your phone to the Mac using iTunes. That will include all your iMessages.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:19 AM on October 10, 2022