Here's a fun one: My wife uses her iPhone as a hub for pretty much all communications with immediate family and a number of close friends, and correspondingly, her iMessages archive is enormous. Like seven or eight gigabytes enormous. For sentimental reasons, she wants to extract and store a large chunk of it in a safer location, and be able to review it at her leisure.
Unfortunately, it appears Apple is intentionally obtuse regarding how to extract iMessages for independent storage and review. And since we don't have any Mac products other than her phone and a couple iPads, I need to back up to a PC. I find a number of freeware utilities claiming these capabilities, but since I'm entirely new to Mac Hacking I'm wondering if anyone can give pointers to a method or utility that is reliable and won't load up the host PC with a bunch of adware?