iMessage Backup

Purpose

I developed this app because the iMessage app is notoriously bad at searching, exporting, and managing historic messages. Like many Apple users, I sync my iPhone with my Mac, and I use the Mac iMessage app when I am at my computer.
The iMessage app keeps all messages in a database, so I wrote this little node script to export them into a much more searchable format: HTML.

Installation

You need to install Node JS. If you do not have Node installed, please download from here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

Open Terminal.app and make sure you are in the iMessagesBackup folder. Run the following command:

npm install

Great! You are now ready to export your iMessage conversations!

Run the script

I have added some options to the script for customizing the output of the script. You can see all the options by running

node exportMessages.js -help

Which will display:

Usage: exportMessages [options] <accountId>

Options:

 -h, --help                   output usage information
 -V, --version                output the version number
 -o, --order <order>          Sort messages by date in asc or desc order
 -s, --skip <n>               Skip the first <n> number of rows
 -l, --limit <n>              Only export <n> number of rows
 -d, --debug                  Run in debug mode
 -f, --file <file>            Specify the iMessage database file to load.
 -n, --line-numbers           Show line numbers
 -a, --output-file <outFile>  The name of the output file html

Arguments:

accountId      The iMessage phone number or email address to pull records for. IE: +15554443333

Note, the <accountId> parameter is either a phone number or the email address of the iMessage account you want to export. If it is a phone number, you will need to have a "+" and the country code of the phone number. So a US number would need a +1 in front of it.

All Image attachments will be viewable inline, but any other attachments will be linked. All output files and attachments are saved in the output directory.

Examples

node exportMessages.js -o asc -s 1000 -l 1000 -o 1000To2000.html +15555555555

Will export the first 1001 to 2001 messages of the conversation you had with 555-555-5555 and save them as the file 1000To2000.html.

Customize

Feel free to customize the templates/default.hbs template if you would like to change the look and feel. I use Handlebars templates.
For information on using Handlebars, visit http://handlebarsjs.com/

Acknowledgement

The HTML/CSS template is based on work done by http://codepen.io/2ne/

Donate

If you found this script helpful, you can Buy Me a Coffee!