Have you noticed that virtually every aspect of the personal information on our iPhones can be restored individually via iCloud? Things like photos, mail, contacts, calendars, Safari bookmarks, and notes can all be individually recovered on a fresh install of iOS.
The one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is text messages and iMessages. Sure, it’s possible to restore text messages if you’re willing to backup and restore the entire contents of your iPhone, but what if you wish to perform a fresh install of iOS and then restore messages?
Fortunately, backing up and restoring SMS texts and iMessages on an individual basis is possible, as long as you’re willing to take some time to follow our step-by-step guide.
Before doing anything, be sure that you have backups of your device either stashed away on iTunes or in iCloud.
Things you’ll need:
- A computer
- iTunes
- Lightning cable
- iBackupBot
Step 1: Back up the iPhone containing the text messages that you wish to migrate to your computer using iTunes. Be sure to check the This computer option and ensure that you have the Encrypt iPhone backup option unchecked. Once the backup is completed, unplug the iPhone. The destination iPhone can be the same device, or a new device. If it’s the same device and you wish to start with a new slate, reset the iPhone to factory defaults after performing the backup. If it’s a new device just out of the box, go through its initial setup until you arrive at the iOS Home screen.
Step 2: Connect the destination iPhone to your computer and open iTunes. Perform a backup just like you did in Step 1. Keep the iPhone connected to your computer, and keep iTunes open.
Step 3: Launch iBackupBot and select your just-created backup under the Backups section (you can verify by comparing the time stamp of the last backup in iTunes). Click the disclosure triangle next to the name of your backup, and click User Information Manager.
Step 4: Click the Messages Tab, and click Import. You may be asked to select the backup that you wish to import from. If so, select the backup of the device that we created in Step 1 and click OK.
Step 5: Click OK on the Import Messages box.
Step 6: On the Import File box, click the check box that says Do this for all conflicts and click Yes.
Step 7: Click OK on the dialogue box stating that messages and attachments have been merged with the backup.
Step 8: Close iBackupBot.
Step 9: Switch back to iTunes, and click Restore backup, select the same backup that you last created in Step 2 and click Restore.
Step 10: Your iPhone will restore from backup, which will include the text messages merged in via iBackupBot.
Step 11: Once the restore is complete, open the Messages app to ensure that all of your messages have been migrated. The messages should include all attachments as well. You may need to restore your contacts via iCloud or other service in order to match messages with contact names.
Video walkthrough
Congratulations, you should now have your text and iMessage messages restored on a clean iOS install. Yes, the process is a tad convoluted, but it’s nice to have the option of keeping text messages while still being able to enjoy a fresh install of iOS.
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Interesting. Never thought you could do this.
Can I use it to transfer text messages from my iPhone 6s to computer and then copy them to my new iPhone 7?
iBackupBot used to be so good but now it’s pretty outdated. It didn’t even recognize my iPhone 7. I end up using this tool http://www.easyphonerecovery.com/how-to-backup-save-iphone-text-messages-to-pc-or-mac.html It can backup iPhone text messages and also iMessages to a computer. You can also use this same program to restore the text messages and iMessages from the backup.
Does this work with HealthKit data?
Don’t you lose workout information when doing a non-encrypted backup? Seems like you’re either losing your texts or your healthkit info.
Correct, you will lose it. I learned this the hard way several times.
Will I lose my the healthkit data if my iTunes backup is not encrypted?
it will be nice if they incorporate things for activity / health data — because there another app for that does a similar process.
Strange. I’ve never done anything but the normal backup procedures and I have my text messages going back as far as 2008 on my recently (2 months ago) acquired iPhone 5S
That’s correct. But your method also restored everything else as well. This tutorial is for restoring JUST text messages and nothing else. It’s for people who want a totally clean factory reset but keep messages in tact.
That distinction was indeed lost on me. Now the article makes sense again. Thanks for clearing it up.
why apple don’t allow users to choose what to restore?
this is a good article. its not my responsibility to check every single article on the internet, but i would be concerned that doing this would lose your keychain of all wifi devices you have ever connected to. iCloud keychain only backs up web passwords. it doesn’t back up wifi passwords. wifi passwords are ‘pushed’ they are not saved on apple’s servers. someone please verify what i said
pushed , meaning, if i connect my iPhone to my friends wifi hotspot, that password is pushed to all my iCloud devices. but it isn’t saved on apple’s servers.
if you do a complete reset. you lose all those passwords. i think.
i tested wifi passwords on the apple watch, and as far as i can tell , it seems to be stored in ram.
test:
connect iPhone to wifi network
wait for apple watch to connect to that wifi network
forget network on iPhone
the apple watch will stay connected until it is powered down
as soon as you enter the password on the iPhone , it will push it to the apple watch.
it seems to me everytime you turn on your watch or turn in wifi + bluetooth on the paired phone, the iPhone gives the watch its entire wifi keychain
Another alternative I like saves texts to your computer but doesn’t put them back on an iPhone. I like that better because they are now searchable. Phoneview dot com.
On a similar note, I submitted feedback to Apple to be able to add bookmarks in messages. For people that keep massages for years it just is near impossible to find them again by just scrolling.
I have been looking for something like this for years. Like a month ago I learned about the IBotBackup thing and did it. It was a mess afterward and ended up deleting my phone. Messages or iMessages didn’t organized by date or time, they just maintained a fix order. Like the latest message never went on top of the others. On top of that you had to lose the activity data, bc of the inscription, with all the results of the Apple Watch and stuff, idk. Didn’t work for me.
You’re right. It didn’t work for me either. Exact same problem. Whats the point of bringing back old messages if it will mess up functionality completely? I’m restoring from an old backup now, I hope it’s not too late. :/
I have exactly the same problem… not sure what to do except to declare text message bankruptcy and start over again from scratch… :(
I have my iPhone set to clear messages after 30 days. It’s rather liberating.
That would be, for sure. But I can’t tell you how many times having saved messages has saved my butt. I need mine.
Am I able to migrate old messages to the iPhone that I’ve using without losing any date or doing a clean installation?
Imo Apple’s biggest balls up is losing all health data on a fresh install. Again there’s a third party app to the rescue but Apple must realise this is an issue.
What app is that? I want my sms and healthkit data, is this possible?
Apple does allow health data to transfer when restoring, but only when it’s an encrypted backup: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220
Or you could just backup and restore messages db files over USB/ssh.
Only if your iPhone is jaiilbroken… Which is likely what mucked everything up to begin with.
I’ve used this method myself to restore my iMessage histories to my new iPad and it works great. I really do wish Apple would give us the option of storing our iMessage histories in the cloud for those of us who want it! They’re actually pretty important to me and I always keep them. I get it might be a privacy issue for some, but for me, the stuff that is already connected to iCloud (i.e., my calendar, photos, emails, iPhone location, etc) is way more sensitive than my Messages anyway, and the convenience would far outweigh any negatives for me. I just think it’d be nice if greater cloud integration were an option, as it is for all those other services. Hopefully soon!
Did you experience the “out of order incoming messages” issue in other comments listed here? Namely, new incoming messages appear at the bottom instead of the top of the messages list or are otherwise not arriving chronological order anymore?
Why not use sms backup & restore?
Unless you’re talking about an app that also backs up iMessages, SMS messages won’t include one’s iMessage threads.
I just used this method, and it didn’t work out so well. For me at least, it successfully moved my old text messages back onto the phone after a restore, but any new text messages randomly showed up at the bottom of the list. If I got a new text, I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of my text history to find the new message and read it. It seemed to jumble up the ordering of the texts as well. A person that I just texted yesterday was down toward the bottom of my text message history sandwiched between two other text chains from a month ago. They were all timestamped correctly, but just misordered. It wasn’t worth it to me, so I ended up just erasing all of my texts and starting blank. Hopefully someone can identify the cause behind that and provide a solution. Thanks!
I had this same problem. Have people been able to do this successfully while maintaining the messages index in proper chronological order?
Same problem here. Anybody find a fix yet?
Same problem here. Someone help us!
“Step 1: Backup the iPhone”
Okay, I’m backupping it!
There, I backupped it.
#OwwEnglishIsHard
Has anyone else had the issue that the message are no longer sorted by date after doing this??
Yes, I have the same issue after following this method. But it was either this or having an incorrect battery percentage forever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Crashes, hangs, freezes, quits, freezes, crashes hangs, crashes . . . . .
will restoring also restore my iPhone to the latest firmware though?
any clue if this still works with ios 10?
I tried this but unfortunately it resulted in my iMessages being stuck out of order with no apparent fix (thereby rendering the application functionally useless)
I was having issues with iOS10 though… will this work with iOS 10?? Thx!
ibackupbot failed on Sierra after multiple attempts and a purchase of ibackupbot, I bought yet another software (for almost the same price), and voilla it worked GREAT! ANYTRANS did it.
I only write this to tell you because after almost $100, and weeks of wrangling (experimentation)… AnyTrans worked remarkably well!