Text Backup and Restore possible to different phones?

[sard]

Hello all,

I've spoken to a few different people at the Apple Store and gotten various answers and I was hoping someone here can give me the right answer (perhaps even with some testing if you have time)

I have:
iPhone 6S - work phone
iPhone 5 - personal phone

I have to give my work phone back but I have texts on there I would like to keep (is there a software program that can download the texts for offline viewing on my laptop?)
I am planning on trading my iPhone 5 in for the iPhone SE in a few weeks.

Is this possible?
Backup 6S to my laptop
Get the SE (now my iPhone 5 will be unused)
Do a factory reset and then Restore the texts from the 6S to my iPhone 5

1 person at the Apple Store said that its possible since backups are just data and you can put data anywhere.
Another guy said it is NOT possible because the information is associated with phone number A, but I will be restoring it to a phone that has a different (or even has no) phone number.

If that is possible, what about if I tried restoring the texts from the 6S to the SE?
Would that work? If the phone is actually "in use" with a totally different phone number.

Thank you all

 

[wx4olf]

I suggest you search this forum, sub-forum and Google as I think similar topics have been discussed. If I recall correctly you could previously move the messages database from an unencrypted backup from the old phone to an unencrypted backup of the new phone and then restore from that. I don't know if you can still do that or not with iOS 9. I also believe there are several applications that claim to allow you to backup and restore messages from one phone to another - back in the iOS 7 days I used one called imazing to move my wife's messages from her old phone to her new one however I don't know if they are still around or even if it would still work today so I really recommend doing some google searching and reading old threads here.