This is not exactly the best way to use Perl. However, I wanted to create it as simple and readable as I possibly could so that others would be able to modify the code to better suit them. Also, if you are not a programmer, you may find this difficult. You can email me for help but if you need something more user friendly, there's a lot of paid apps out there that are more elegant :)

Notes

• Emojis would only show up when viewing the pages in Safari.
• Images and videos are visible within the message threads, but all other content is linked.
• Files are overwritten without checking to see if one already exists.
• If you get an error about the DateTime module, please see this CPAN article on installing modules: http://www.cpan.org/modules/INSTALL.html
• This does not support group texts. It just adds the text sent from a user to that user's thread with you. This is basically a bug, but I haven't figured out how to do group texts yet.

Basic steps:

1. Make a directory somewhere

   mkdir ~/Desktop/iOSBackup
   

2. Add this repository to your ~/Desktop/iOSBackup directory

   cd ~/Desktop/iOSBackup
   
   git clone [email protected]:chelseybaker/iOSMessageExport.git
   

3. I reccomend copying your iTunes backup into your ~/Desktop/iOSBackup folder, just in case something bad happens (as I am not responsible for your misfortunes). Run backup.pl passing the backup directory.

   perl iOSMessageExport/backup.pl --directory_path 9b9f73759fad7b31e330dd26bf7f745acccf1869/
   

   If you see an error that iOSSMSBackup cannot be found, you may need to run

   export PERLLIB=iOSMessageExport/
   

4. An _export folder will be created in your working directory with all of your files!