How to save the messages of someone who has died

If you are reading this because someone you love has died and their messages are on a phone, this is the practical part, written plainly. There is no rush on grief, but there is some urgency on the technical side, so the first section is the one that matters most.

Do this first

Do not let the phone run out of battery and stay off. A phone that has been powered off requires the passcode on next start, and Face ID or Touch ID will not work. If the phone is currently unlocked or you know the passcode, act now rather than later.

Do not reset, wipe, or “return to the carrier” any device yet.

Do not remove the Apple ID from a device if you can avoid it.

If you have the passcode and the phone is working, everything below is straightforward. If you do not, skip to the section on locked devices.

If you have the phone and the passcode

Make a local backup, today. This puts a copy on your own computer and stops the outcome depending on that one phone surviving.

1. Connect the iPhone to a Mac or PC with a cable.
2. On a Mac, open Finder and select the device in the sidebar. On Windows, use the Apple Devices app.
3. Choose Back Up Now, and let it finish. If you tick Encrypt local backup, note the password somewhere you will not lose it, because there is no way to recover it. Messages are included either way.

Once that backup exists on your computer, the immediate risk is over. The phone can fail and you still have the conversation.

Then get the conversation into something you can read

A backup protects you, but you cannot open one and read it. It is a folder of files with hashed names, and its only supported use is restoring it onto a phone. If you want to actually read the messages, sit with them, print them, or share them with family, you need to export the conversation.

Free option: imessage-exporter is open source and works from a Mac’s own message library or a device backup, from the command line.

Message Album, which made this site, does the same thing with a normal Mac interface: it reads either the Mac’s Messages library or a Finder backup sitting on the Mac, and writes out one conversation as a folder you can open in a browser, with every photo, video and voice note at the quality it was sent.

Whichever you use, what you want at the end is a plain folder, on your own disk, that opens without any particular app or account.

If the messages are on your own Mac already

If you and they messaged over iMessage and you have a Mac, the conversation may already be on it, and no access to their phone is needed at all. Open Messages on the Mac and look for the thread. If it is there, you can export it directly.

This is worth checking before anything harder, because it is often the whole answer.

If the device is locked and you do not have the passcode

This is much harder, and honesty is more useful here than hope.

Apple cannot unlock a device or bypass a passcode, and will not do so on request. What does exist:

• Legacy Contact. If the person set up a Legacy Contact in their Apple ID settings before they died, that person can request access to the account data, including messages, with the access key they were given and a death certificate. This is the intended route and by far the easiest one.
• Digital Legacy request without a key. Apple has a process for requesting access to a deceased person’s account. Without a Legacy Contact key it generally requires a court order, and it takes time.
• An old backup you already have. Check ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup on any Mac they used, or your own if you ever backed up their phone. People forget these exist.
• Your own side of the conversation. Your phone, iPad or Mac has every message they sent you and every one you sent them. This is not the same as their whole message history, but for the conversation between the two of you, it is complete. It is very often enough.

That last point is worth sitting with. If what you want is the conversation between you and them, you very likely already have all of it, on a device you own, right now.

Keep more than one copy

Once you have an export, copy it somewhere else. An external drive, another family member’s computer, cloud storage of your choice. A single copy on one laptop is one spilled drink away from being nothing.

If you have siblings or other family, giving each of them a copy is both the best backup strategy and, usually, a kind thing to do. Because a good export is an ordinary folder that opens in a browser, they do not need to buy or install anything to read it.

What to preserve beyond the messages

While you are in this, and only if you want to be:

• Voice notes. These are the ones people say they are most glad they kept, because a recording of a voice is not something screenshots can hold. Make sure whatever you use preserves audio as playable files rather than dropping it.
• Photos in the thread, at full resolution, not squashed into a PDF.
• The date range. Knowing a conversation runs from a particular year to a particular day matters later, more than it seems to now.

A note on doing this at all

There is no correct time to do this, and no obligation to read any of it now. Making the copy and closing the laptop is a complete and reasonable outcome. The point of preserving it today is that it removes the deadline, so that whenever you do want to read it, in a month or in twenty years, it is still there.