After losing a loved one, you may want to hold onto your old text message conversations, but it’s not straightforward on iMessage. If you want to backup your chat history, the first step is to change how long your iMessage texts are being stored. Go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and select Forever if you don’t want your older texts to automatically delete.
Credit: Pranay Parab
You also want to protect your iMessage texts in the inevitable event you end up changing to a new device, so enable iCloud sync. Go to Settings > [YOUR NAME] > iCloud > Show All > Messages in iCloud and enable Use on this iPhone. This will ensure that all your iMessages move with you to your new Apple devices.
Credit: Pranay Parab
And finally, to be safe, you can use a Mac for a complete backup of your iMessages. On your Mac, open the Messages app, go to the correct chat, and scroll all the way to the top. This takes a while, but it will let you go back to your first conversation (searching for old messages might help bring you to the top). When that’s done, select File > Print or press Command+P to save the entire chat as a PDF. And if you find that process too cumbersome, you can try third-party apps to simply things. I previously covered iMessage exporter, which is a free command line tool that lets you backup all of your chats quickly.
Credit: Pranay Parab
If all else fails, you can take screenshots of your most important conversations, of course. It’s obviously the most crude method to get the job done, but it works. In case you don’t have a Mac, you can just scroll through your iMessage chat on your iPhone and keep taking screenshots as you go. There are many ways to take long screenshots on your iPhone and will stitch all of these images into one file, should you want to preserve your chat that way.
