How to archive old text messages?

January 13, 2018 9:46 AM

I'd like to pull all the text messages I have off an iPhone 5c and save them to a PC, so that the phone has more free data but I don't lose the messages. Is this possible?
posted by lewedswiver to Technology (6 answers total)

There are tons of apps that do this in the app store. Depends which features you want. I have an Android phone, but I use something called SMS Backup Plus that saves all my text messages to an Gmail account. It does it on a real-time basis but it could also archive everything at once too.
posted by AppleTurnover at 10:03 AM on January 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Possible but not cheap. iExplorer is the app frequently suggested for this sort of thing that is dual platform. PhoneView from Ecamm is a good one for Mac. CopyTrans is another one for PC.
posted by jessamyn at 10:59 AM on January 13, 2018

Back it up in iTunes and install a program on your PC that lets you browse an iPhone backup file, like Backup Viewer. If you encrypt it in iTunes I think you can feed it the password to browse the backup but you may want to test that before you wipe.
posted by msbutah at 11:59 AM on January 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

SMSs are not big: you can fit thousands of them in the size of a single photo. Are you sure they are what is taking up all of your space? Or are they iMessages with video and photos?
posted by katrielalex at 1:26 PM on January 13, 2018

Response by poster: It's over a gigabyte... I imagine it's significantly pictures or videos within the messages, but I wouldn't know how to find the specific messages that are particularly large that I could save and then delete from the phone.

Thanks all!
posted by lewedswiver at 4:29 PM on January 13, 2018

Updating to the latest iOS version introduces new features (Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage) that identify large attachments in iMessages that allows for easier scrubbing to recover storage.
posted by Baphomet's Prime at 5:56 AM on January 14, 2018 [1 favorite]