Saving text messages to your computer is a great way to preserve memories, free up space on your iPhone, or make sure that you've got a backup of important conversations. We're also starting to see legal precedent that people should save text messages by printing or making additional electronic copies if they foresee a possible need for those text messages in court. (Take a look at this article for more on documenting text messages for court.)
This guide will teach you how to save your text messages (including iMessages) from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to a computer. We'll also address how to export the text messages into an HTML document so that it's in a nice general format for future use or for printing.
The first couple steps of this guide don't have you do anything on your iPhone yet, because you might have text messages in an older backup that are no longer on your iPhone. Since we're going to be pulling your text messages from your iPhone backups, we're going to start by saving the messages from existing backups on your computer.
Download the installer for Decipher TextMessage, install it, and run it. Decipher TextMessage will look for your iPhone backups, and import the messages automatically.
Once the message importing is complete, the main window will appear, showing all of your iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches that have data from the Messages app. Click a device, and then click a contact to look at the text history for that contact.
If you don't see your phone listed here yet, don't worry. We'll be adding it in a moment.
Decipher TextMessage imports messages, photos, and videos from your iPhone backups, so we need to make a new backup to get the latest data from your iPhone. Here's how to make a backup of your iPhone in iTunes:
If this is your first time using this phone with iTunes, you may be asked to "trust" or "authorize" this computer. If so, unlock your phone from the home screen and press the "trust" button on the dialog that appears on the phone. You may also see a big welcome screen asking whether you want to set up your phone as a new phone, or restore from a backup. You should choose to set it up as a new device. Scary as the choice sounds, this won't wipe your phone, it just adds the iPhone to iTunes. If you're in doubt, please feel free to contact us and we'll help guide you!
Close Decipher TextMessage if it's still open from step one, and reopen it. Your new backup data will be imported automatically as Decipher TextMessage starts up. Select your iPhone and a contact to view your saved text messages.
We love Decipher TextMessage, but I still think it's smart to save important conversations in a program independent format. Decipher TextMessage can export conversations in HTML, plain-text, and csv formats.
The HTML export is great for conversations with photos and other attachments. Just about every computer has a good web browser, and the HTML file export leverages your browser to display an iPhone-like rendering of your conversation.
Plain text export is great for a compact representation of your conversation when photo (and other) attachments aren't important.
CSV export is useful if you want to store your text messages in a spreadsheet program like Excel or Numbers.
To export texts from Decipher TextMessage, select the conversations
you want to save, and press the Export
button. A menu will pop
up giving you the various save options.
If you want physical copies of your messages, here is our FAQ on how to print iPhone text messages.
To quickly summarize one more time, here is how to save your iPhone text messages to your computer:
We hope this guide helps you save your text messages! If you have questions, please leave a comment below, or contact us directly. We know your messages are important, and we'll try to answer as quickly as possible.
The information on this web site is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact an attorney for advice with respect to any particular issue or problem.
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