Text conversations seem unimportant in the moment. They’re a jumpy collection of short sentences and single words, inside jokes, a smattering of emojis, maybe a GIF here and there. At a glance, they don’t seem nearly as worth preserving as a thought-out letter or personal email.
So how do we treat them more like letters? Many of us don’t think about how to save digital chats until there’s a reason, like a loved one dying or a breakup. Unfortunately, that can be too late for some of these files. Whether it’s Apple’s iMessage or WhatsApp, here’s what you should start thinking about now if you want to look back fondly on chat logs.
Identify what’s worth saving
Think about how many people you’ve messaged this week and how many words you exchanged. Even just today, perhaps while reading this site. Overwhelmed?
We generate a massive amount of digital documentation, and while saving it all through regular backups is common, actually archiving conversations for the future requires some editing. Storage isn’t free and backups can be lost or overwritten. If a chat is particularly meaningful, you’ll want to take extra steps to make sure it’s safe and accessible for a longer time. That starts with choosing what matters to you.
“It is so personal. If we look back at ancient documents, even from 100 years ago, there’s not so much to select from,” says archivist Margot Note, author of “Creating Family Archives,” a guide to preserving personal documents. “Now there’s almost an influx of information, it’s more finding the needle in the haystack.”
That might mean identifying the people whose conversations mean the most to you. Your parents or children, a spouse or a best friend. Even one of those documents could include far more than you want — like a few sweet exchanges between pages of grocery list reminders. If so, you’ll want to keep an eye out for exchanges that are meaningful and save them at the time.
You can change your mind or add anyone else to the list as life goes on. The secret is to have good backups to draw from and saved in multiple locations. (We’ll get to that later.)
Not every conversation should be saved, especially not in an unencrypted easy-to-view digital format. When texts are saved like this, they are at higher risk of being exposed, either through hacks or legal processes. Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes discovered this when her intimate text messages with former partner and boyfriend Sunny Balwani were entered as evidence in her recent fraud trial.
If you are having conversations that are high risk, there are precautions you can take to make sure your chat histories are as secure as possible. We break down everything you need to know to chat securely in this article. But many of those strategies, like disappearing messages, won’t leave any trail to look back on.
Check your settings
Chat apps have settings for how long conversations are saved. For example, on an Apple device, you can choose to keep messages for 30 days, 1 year or forever. On Signal, you can set a timer for how long chats will be around before they disappear. Make sure the chats you’re interested in aren’t set to delete after a set period of time. (Some apps will let you decide on each conversation and others are across all chats.)
If you’re mostly worried about photos that people share with you over messages and not the chit chat, check for a setting that will automatically save images to your device or a cloud service, like on WhatsApp.
The flip side to keeping messages forever is that they can start sucking up storage on your devices or in cloud accounts, especially when they contain lots of images. That can be fixed with a different backup system and by taking back ownership of your own conversations.
Find your file format, from PDFs to paper
Our love for our families might be forever, but file formats aren’t. To have the best chance of keeping these saved conversations long-term, you’ll want to choose formats that will likely be around for a long time. And the ultimate way to future proof conversations is, yes, paper.
A printed document, especially on archival quality paper, can outlast your computer and the tech companies and apps that come and go. Because chats can be lengthy, you could even turn one into a bound book using a tool like Keepster.
“In many ways the physical stuff is easier to preserve and will last longer. We know how long paper will preserve over time. It can save for hundreds of years,” says Note, the archivist.
Digital files are still necessary, especially for anything so big, and you’ll need a search function. Note recommends saving conversations and any other important text as PDF/A files. Unlike regular PDFs, these files include all the fonts and other elements to make sure the file looks the same when you open it in the future.
You can also save simple file types like a text document or a CSV (comma separate value, which can be viewed in a spreadsheet app.)
Pry your conversations away from Apple
While many apps let you just copy and paste your conversations into a fresh file, or export them, sometimes it’s tricky, like in the case of Apple’s iMessage.
Apple’s iMessage is the company’s default encrypted messaging system. It uses the Messages app on iOS devices or a desktop and includes features that only work between Apple customers while Android acquaintances are marked with a green bubble. The messages are encrypted, which makes them very secure but also difficult to extract from the Apple ecosystem.
There’s an advantage to having all your texts in Messages and saved to iCloud. They’re searchable and in their original format and you always know where to find them. If you are using iCloud, they can quickly eat up your storage and, if something goes wrong with a backup, be deleted accidentally. Or maybe you’re just switching to Android.
To get those conversations, you can turn on the Messages app on a computer. If you don’t see the conversation here but it is on your phone or iPad, open Settings and make sure your Apple account is enabled. Next, you have two options. With the conversation open, scroll up as far as the chat goes. If it’s years, this might take a while. Go to Print and select PDF or select all, copy and paste into a text document or spreadsheet program.
There are drawbacks to each. The PDFs will be long with lots of unnecessary space. One month of regular chats can easily run over 50 pages. Copying and pasting is more compact but doesn’t include any dates or images.
Third party apps can help. iMazing is a Mac app with a free trial and $35 paid version for managing the data on your iPhone or iPad, or a backup you’ve made of a device and saved to your computer. If you’re working with an encrypted backup, you will need the encryption password for iMazing to be able to read the data. Or you can use an unencrypted backup of your phone. The app has options for exporting as a PDF, Excel file, CSV, text or just for pulling out all the attachments like images and videos.
Beyond Apple, each chat app usually has an export option but if not, copy and paste is clean and simple. This works well for direct messages on social media sites. There is also the in-the-moment option of making a screenshot or screen recording of exchanges you want to keep. If you see something quotable and memorable, take a screenshot and drop it into a folder especially for those greatest hits.
Remember to name any files and folders descriptively so they’re easy to find, says Note.
Back it up, then back it up again
You have four lengthy text docs or PDFs saved, filled with years of banter with your favorite people. Now where do they go?
At least three different places. Put them in a folder and save them to the cloud service you currently use, like Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud. Save one copy on your computer. Then save on an external hard drive. This gives you three redundancy plans. Four if you also printed it out on paper and safely put it in a filing cabinet, five if it’s also in the original app.
And having it all in those locations means that whenever you want to relive something, or remember someone, you’re just a few taps or clicks away.
