Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Question; how do you backup 3+ years of iMsg conversations? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by starbucks1971@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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I have Messages turned on in iCloud and so that is covered but what if a technical issue pops up and one of the suggestions was to clear out any old conversations to "see if that solves the problem".

I mean; these conversations with family and groups are memories and I would like to make multiple copies of it.

Asked if anyone here felt the same and found a solution.

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[–] Thinking-Guy@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

As I recall, if you have a MacBook, iMessage syncs your messages and stores them in a file named ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

That file or files (my notes don't say number or the names of files) is just a SQL database which can be queried with the sqlite client, or exported into a more friendly format.

This solution worked for me about 5 years ago; I don't know if Apple still allows this.

[–] I_LIKE_RED_ENVELOPES@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Do you know if this includes attachments as well? Or are they stored elsewhere.

[–] Thinking-Guy@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Unfortunately I don't remember.