Introduction: How to Download and Save IPhone Messages to PC for Free

Text messages are taking over phone calls and e-mail. The texts on your iPhone are now one of your most important forms of communication with your friends, family, loved ones and coworkers. Maybe a friend sent you a funny joke that you want to save or maybe you need to make a backup of a text for legal purposes. Do you want to access and download your iPhone’s text messages to your PC for backup or something else with ease?

The following tutorial walks you through how to use Syncios free manager to view and export your iPhone text messages to your computer as a .txt document.

What you will need:

  • Syncios free manager
  • An iPhone, iPad, or iPod
  • A Windows PC with iTunes installed
  • USB cord to connect your iPhone, iPad, or iPodStep

Step 1. Download and install the software on computer and run it

Syncios can load, display and backup text messages on your iDevice or extract text messages from iTunes backup file. The following article will show you both methods to download messages to computer step by step.

Step 2. Access Text Messages on Your iPhone

To access text messages on an iPhone, open Syncios free manager and connect your iPhone to your computer with USB cable. Once detected, you will see the Device Overview screen appear. From this screen navigate to Information on the left column, click Messages Tab in the top column. It will take a while for the program to loading the entire message database. On the left column, you'll see your conversation list, and detailed conversations on the right preview screen. There are 4 buttons on the top Backup, Recover, Save, Refresh. Many people may think clicking Backup will be the right choice.

If your device is jailbroken, the answer is yes. If your device is not jailbroken, you will get the prompt “SMS/Call history backup and restore functions are valid only on jailbroken devices.”. For non-jailbroken devices, please turn to Save button instead.

Step 3. Save your text messages, iMessages to PC for free

Once you click the Save buttonYou can get the newly-opened default backup location on the PC: C:\Users\yourusername\Documents\Syncios\Information\ ,then click OK. The text messages will be saved as .txt document, naming SMS_devicename_date+time.txt

Method 2. Exporting iPhone SMSs and Text Messages to computer as .txt document.

Step 1: Download Syncios Data Recovery to Your Computer (Windows or Mac).

Another way for backing up your SMS text messages from your iPhone to your computer is by using Syncios Data Recovery for Windows or Syncios Data Recovery for Mac. When you create a backup of your iPhone using iTunes, your text messages are saved to your computer, but they get buried deep within various semi-encrypted databases. Syncios Data Recovery can do the heavy lifting for you and make these messages readily available and prettily formatted into a .HTML or .CSV document, so you can read and export them on your computer.

Step 2: Run the Program and Access Text Messages From an ITunes Backup of an IPhone

The first step is to ensure that you backed up your iPhone via iTunes. If not, please do a backup now, you can refer to this tutorial:

Run Syncios Data Recovery application, you will get three methods on the home interface; choose Recover from iTunes backup file in the middle. All the backup files on your local disc will be scanned out and listed. Click the name of the backup file which you need and click Start Scan.

Step 3: Preview and Save IPhone SMSs and Text Messages

The scanning will take some time, depending on the backup file size. Clicking on Message or Messages attachment, which is on the left column, then click Recover button on the button right of the interface. A window allowing you to define a folder to keep recovered data will pop up. Just rename a folder and click Save. Then done!

Backup iPhone Text Messages & iMessages

Backup iPhone MMS to PC


Step 4: View IPhone Messages on PC

As you see, Syncios Data Recovery supports 3 ways, either directly scan your iPhone device or by scanning iTunes or iCloud backup file. With those three ways, you can backup iPhone text messages to computer and all other precious files and data to your computer with no worries.