Practical, tested guides from the project behind ChatAttic — how to get your conversations out of WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Messenger and your phone's texts, and keep them as an archive you actually own.
The exact taps for Export chat on both phones, what you get (a .txt transcript and a media .zip), the 40,000-message limit — and how to turn the exports into one archive you own.
Read the guide →Why the iCloud/Google Drive backup isn't a readable archive and can't cross iPhone and Android — and how to make real, portable copies, kept safe and de-duplicated, before you switch.
Read the guide →Where iMessage really lives on a Mac, how to copy the chat.db database safely,
and how to turn it into one readable, de-duplicated archive you own.
Using the free Telegram Desktop app to export one chat — or your whole history — as JSON, and folding it into one private archive you actually own.
Read the guide →Requesting your DMs from Meta as a JSON download, and turning that pile of files — mojibake and all — into one clean, readable archive.
Read the guide →Exporting your texts to XML with SMS Backup & Restore, and keeping them as one readable, de-duplicated archive of your SMS and MMS.
Read the guide →Making sense of the _chat.txt transcript, finding a message or a date, keeping
the media with it — and turning a pile of exports into one searchable archive.