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it pains me that there is no way to legitimately export your message history for archival. I know it's backed up with icloud and local backups, but I would love

it pains me that there is no way to legitimately export your message history for archival. I know it's backed up with icloud and local backups, but I would love the ability to view message history, run analysis of my convos, and "archive" convos to date (i.e. I want to be able to go back and read the convo, but I don't want to have the 13.4TB of gifs on my phone anymore) So, I may just replicate this "0day" and run it on myself... will be fixed soon, but at least I'd have a single snapshot

kalleboo 7y ago
You can use third-party software like iMazing or PhoneView to extract the message history
- joshspankit 7y ago
  I personally use iMazing for this, it’s pretty great
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- asadhaider 7y ago
  Looks pretty cool, didn't know about iMazing. The new iPhone/Music app in Catalina is a pain to use and has lost functionality. Thanks for the recommendation!
AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
if you enable iCloud sync you can just copy the database (SQLite) off your mac. ~/Library/Messages/
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  It's actually just SQLite? No weird proprietary format or anything? That's both surprising and awesome to hear.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    CoreData, which is commonly used as object storage by apps on Apple’s platforms, is backed by SQLite.
sneak 7y ago
If you do a local backup, there are tools to decrypt it (if encrypted) and view/dump the messages. If the backup is not encrypted, you can skip the decryption step. The message db is just a sqlite file. iOS backups are in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ although the file names are obfuscated. There are tools for browsing the obfuscated file names, or you can just grep for a known string in your messages, find the sqlite file, and rename it to sms.db. My friend wrote a cool tool called sqlite2json at my insistence which, if you don’t know/care to use sqlite, will dump an sqlite file to json. It’s available on pypi for installation via pip.

kalleboo 7y ago

You can use third-party software like iMazing or PhoneView to extract the message history

joshspankit 7y ago
I personally use iMazing for this, it’s pretty great
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
asadhaider 7y ago
Looks pretty cool, didn't know about iMazing. The new iPhone/Music app in Catalina is a pain to use and has lost functionality. Thanks for the recommendation!

AdamJacobMuller 7y ago

if you enable iCloud sync you can just copy the database (SQLite) off your mac. ~/Library/Messages/

dodobirdlord 7y ago
It's actually just SQLite? No weird proprietary format or anything? That's both surprising and awesome to hear.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  CoreData, which is commonly used as object storage by apps on Apple’s platforms, is backed by SQLite.

sneak 7y ago

If you do a local backup, there are tools to decrypt it (if encrypted) and view/dump the messages. If the backup is not encrypted, you can skip the decryption step. The message db is just a sqlite file. iOS backups are in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ although the file names are obfuscated. There are tools for browsing the obfuscated file names, or you can just grep for a known string in your messages, find the sqlite file, and rename it to sms.db. My friend wrote a cool tool called sqlite2json at my insistence which, if you don’t know/care to use sqlite, will dump an sqlite file to json. It’s available on pypi for installation via pip.