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ludi
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Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Thu Jun 11, 2015 11:24 am

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?
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Thu Jun 11, 2015 1:59 pm

Is the backup password protected? I was thinking that the files are just ZIP archives with the file extension changed, so you could dig around, but I don't back up to my PC so I can't really test...
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ludi
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Fri Jun 12, 2015 5:48 pm

I'll take a look when time permits, I really have no idea what the iTunes backup format looks like.
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Aphasia
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Sun Jun 14, 2015 6:59 am

If you have an UNencrypted iphone backup stored on the PC, you can read all the SMS/Imessages from the phone via a sqlite utility. I used sqlitebrowser when I did that.
The trick is find the right file then find the Contact you want since the name is only stored in the messages as a database id that correlates to the Contact that sent it.

I looked at the article I read about it, but that was in Swedish, You could run it through google translate..
http://macworld.idg.se/2.1038/1.321492/ ... honens-sms

but basically...
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/[unique string]/3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata
open that with an SQLite browser.

There is also several different backup utils for money that might do it for you.
 
bthylafh
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Sun Jun 14, 2015 8:48 am

On a Windows machine those files should be stored in %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ assuming you're backing up with iTunes.
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Sun Jun 14, 2015 12:54 pm

Right you are...
C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[UniqueDeviceIDString]

But that's basically the gist of it.
Find the backup
Make sure it's uncrypted.
Take the file you want, in this case the message file with the long number in my last post.
Open it in sqlitebrowser.
Then find an SMS that you know is from a certain person.
Get user ID string after searching
Query the rest of the database, based on the user field.
 
ludi
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Tue Jun 16, 2015 11:19 am

Thanks, this is helpful. I'll get SQLite set up on the PC and see if I can read the data files.
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Usacomp2k3
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Re: Backing up iMessages archive to a Windows PC

Wed Jun 17, 2015 10:14 am

A way to get the file size down is to save all of the pictures/videos within there out and then delete form the conversation thread. That helps tremendously with the file size. Thats what I do with my wife and my conversation.

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