How to Save IMessage Chat History When Someone Dies
After losing a loved one, you might want to save your old text messages, but it’s not easy in iMessage. If you want to backup your chat history, the first step is to change the iMessage retention period. Go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and select Forever if you don’t want your old messages to be automatically deleted.
You also want to protect your iMessage texts in the inevitable event that you move to a new device, so turn on iCloud sync. Go to Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud > Show All > Messages in iCloud and turn on Use on this iPhone . This ensures that all your iMessages carry over with you to your new Apple devices.
And finally, just in case, you can use a Mac to completely back up your iMessages. On your Mac, open the Messages app, go to the chat you want, and scroll all the way to the top. This will take some time, but will allow you to get back to your first conversation (searching for old messages can help you get to the top). Once this is done, choose File > Print or press Command+P to save the entire chat as a PDF. And if you find this process too cumbersome, you can try third-party apps to make things easier. Previously, I talked about iMessage Exporter , a free command line tool that lets you quickly back up all your chats.
If all else fails, you can of course take screenshots of your most important conversations. Obviously this is the crudest way to get the job done, but it works. If you don’t have a Mac, you can simply scroll through your iMessage chat on your iPhone and keep taking screenshots as you go. There are many ways to take long screenshots on your iPhone and combine all those images into one file if you want to save your chat that way.