How to save the messages of someone who has died
If you're reading this, we're sorry. People often don't think about their message history until something makes them afraid of losing it — a new phone, a full storage warning, an account that might close. This page is the practical part: how to make sure the conversation is safe, starting with the things worth doing today.
First: stop the clock
Before anything else, protect what's on the device you have.
- Turn off automatic message deletion. On the iPhone, go to Settings → Apps → Messages → Keep Messages and set it to Forever. If this is set to 30 days or 1 year, older messages are being deleted as you read this. This is the single most important step.
- Don't factory-reset or trade in the phone — theirs or yours — until you've made a backup.
- Make a backup now. Plug the phone into a computer and make a local backup (see below). It takes minutes and it freezes everything in place, so nothing you do afterwards can lose it.
- If it's their phone and it's still unlocked, that access may not last. Battery death or a restart can lock it behind a passcode nobody knows. Treat it as urgent.
Making a backup that includes the messages
Connect the iPhone to a Mac or Windows PC. On a Mac, open Finder and click the phone in the sidebar; on Windows, use the Apple Devices app. Choose to back up to this computer, and tick Encrypt local backup, setting a password you write down somewhere safe.
The encryption box matters more than it sounds: an unencrypted backup deliberately leaves out message attachments and some Messages data. Encrypted backups include them. This backup is now a complete, private copy on your own computer, independent of any account or subscription.
Getting the conversation into something you can keep
A backup is safe but unreadable — it's thousands of files with scrambled names. To actually read, print, or share the conversation, you need to export it. The realistic options:
- Screenshots. Free and immediate. Good for a handful of messages that matter most; impractical for years of them.
- Print from Messages on a Mac. Free. Open the conversation, scroll all the way up to load its history, then File → Print → Save as PDF. Long conversations get truncated and photos often don't survive.
- Desktop export software (iMazing, TouchCopy, Decipher, around $30–$50). Handles long threads and multiple conversations reliably. The output is plain but complete.
- A formatted book. What we make — see below.
Other things people wish they'd saved
Messages are usually the first thought, but the same urgency applies to:
- Voicemails — their voice. On the iPhone, open a saved voicemail, tap share, and save it to Files or email it to yourself. These are lost surprisingly easily.
- Photos and videos in the conversation, which often aren't in the camera roll.
- Their contact card, with the photo and the way you'd saved their name.
Turning the conversation into a book
Many people find a PDF on a hard drive isn't quite what they wanted. There's something different about a printed conversation you can hold, put on a shelf, or give to someone else who loved them — a sibling, a parent, their children.
Keepsake is a small tool that takes an exported conversation and lays it out as a book: the familiar blue and grey message bubbles, photos where they were sent, date headings, a cover page with their name and the date range, and page numbers. It's a one-time payment, it runs entirely in your own browser so the conversation is never uploaded anywhere, and you see the finished book — and its page count — before you're asked to pay for it.
If you'd rather not use it, that's genuinely fine: the free methods above will preserve the words, and that's the part that matters most. Please just do the first section today.
A note on privacy
Be careful about uploading a conversation like this to a website. Ours doesn't upload anything — all the processing happens inside your browser tab, which you can verify in the network tab of your browser's developer tools. Our privacy policy describes exactly what does and doesn't happen to your data.
If you need help doing this
The export step is the hardest part and it's fiddly at the best of times, let alone now. Our step-by-step guide covers each method, and if you get stuck you can ask us.