extracting/backing up Messages

I have been an iPhone user since the beginning. And I've never skipped a year. I have always upgraded my phone each year a new model comes out. And when I setup my new phone, I have always used my backup, carrying everything forward. So I basically have every text I've ever sent/received. With my iPhone 6 Plus, I had some trouble with the lightning port. Sometimes my phone would charge when I plugged it in, sometimes not and it wasn't the cord. Apple took a look at the phone at the store and replaced it. But before doing so, they ran diagnostics and saw that parts of my operating system were crashing. It was suggested that something might be corrupt in my backup causing some instability on my phone. I had been experiencing some quirky behavior, in addition to the problem with the jack, so if the issues returned on the new phone, it would indicate a problem with the backup. It looks like there is a problem with the backup since my iPhone is still acting quirky. So to fix this, I have to start over from scratch. For most things, this is not a problem. All my music, photos, apps, contacts, will be safe since they are saved elsewhere and can be restored on the phone. It's mainly the content in my Messages app (the messages, the photos, vids, etc) that I will lose. I'm not thrilled with the idea of clearing it all out, but I've reached the point with my phone where I think it's probably not performing as well as it could. Of course I could go thru this trouble just to see if it improves and return to using my backup if I don't see an improvement. But I'm thinking, what if it does improve? Is there any way I can save the text messages and content in my Messages app someplace on my laptop such that I could view it and search for stuff, etc? I have tried PhoneView once, but it was not compatible with my version of iOS, so it didn't work very well. Any other options? Or am I being too much of a pack rat and I should just delete them all? Also, what about the iMessage server? How much of my history is on the server? How much might return to my phone just by starting over? I can see my texts on my iPad for example.

 

I've had two ideas.

1. I always buy the latest iPhone, so I'll likely be getting the iPhone 6S Plus. So instead of giving away my old phone, I could keep it in order to maintain all of my old messages. That way, if I ever felt the need to go back in time (which happens occasionally), I would still have a copy of all my old texts in their original format. That would work, right? The act of setting up my new phone as a new phone, not from backup, would not mess with what's in my old phone right? Would I be able to sync this phone with my iTunes in the future? I could see using my old iPhone as a music player in my car - keep it attached to my stereo in my glove compartment. But I would want to be able to add new music to it. It would have its own backup history in my iTunes, right? And on a related note, say I had to give away the old phone - could I say buy a used iPhone and restore it from one of my old backups to retain all my old messages on that device?

2. Do developers have the ability to take an iPhone backup in iTunes and use an iPhone simulator (the one used to test apps they are designing) to recreate everything on the iPhone? Could the simulator be used to view the messages within a backup? Could someone create an app for my Mac Book Pro that could do that? I'm probably dreaming.

 

I'm not sure of how I would do that. My guess is I would have to remove everything from my phone except the contents of my Messages app and create a backup. Would that do it? So I would presumably do this just before setting up my new phone. I can't think of any other way to selectively back up stuff.

I suspect the corruption is within my Messages app since it contains all of my messages going back to when the iPhone first came out. I'm pretty sure it's a huge chunk of data and perhaps just the size alone is giving my phone issues.

Also, I don't use my iCloud for backing up because my backups are too huge. I would have to pay for the extra space.

 

I always name my phones "Paul's iPhone 6 Plus" or whatever version number I am in. So my new phone would be "Paul's iPhone 6S Plus" if that's indeed what Apple is calling it. So thanks for the heads' up, but I think I will be okay.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, but I think this only backs up my messages just to be returned to the phone or another iPhone. I want to create a backup but not return them to my new phone. I suspect that the message history is so huge that I want to clean it out of my phone without completely losing my history. I want to back it up but be able to view it somewhere, just not on my new phone.

 

Just an update. I got my iPhone 6S Plus and I set it up without restoring from backup and I've seen a huge improvement. My phone is much happier now. Yes, it's a little disappointing that my Message history is gone and some of my apps have lost their history but I'm enjoying the increased performance of the phone. I think my backup was just too big and slowing things down.