SMS / text message extraction from iPhone

with the help of this page - for free!

First published on June 10th, 2011
Current version from September 25th, 2012

It all began a few weeks ago when I wrote my own small PHP script that could make a backup of text messages from the iPhone SQLite container into a text file - see the original blog post where I published it for everybody to use it on their own.
However, it required a PHP interpreter in order to be run. Despite the fact that this is easy for Unix users and even though I added a download for a small PHP package, it needed modifications to the user's system that might lead to complications.
Therefore I decided to write this very page (and an additional PHP script) that uses my original (small) work to do the same job however online and of course for free. No need to install anything on your machine.
You can now just upload the SQLite container, make adjustments about the settings if desired, and be prompted with the download of the result file of archived text messages. (Note: empty fields will be filled with the default value)
At the moment the size of the iPhone SQLite container is limited to 25MB to avoid massive abuse. Also the other fields are checked for sanity, which might - in rare cases - lead to valid settings being denied (I'm not an expert in this :) ). Please let me know (via mail or blog comment) if you encounter such problems and I will adjust the code.
Don't hesitate to email me about questions or fire away in the new blog post about this page, and also feel free to link to this page or to my blog.

PRIVACY NOTE: The uploaded data is used for automated extraction only, the temporary files are deleted right after the extraction and no personal data is kept on the server.

Have fun using.
~Harry

Choose a file from your harddrive to be uploaded for message extraction (see step 1 in the original blog post how to find the right file).
Default: test.db
If you would like to format the timestamps in a certain way, specify a timeformat (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php for further information). Otherwise leave blank or default.
Default: d.m.Y H:i:s
If you would like to restrict message extration to only incoming or outgoing texts, select the respective option.
Default: ALL
You can specify the name of the output file already here (you will be prompted again when the download starts).
Default: outfile.txt
Select whether you would like a text, a comma separated value or XML formatted result. So far these are the only options.
Default: TXT
Select the operating system on which you plan to use the output file (it will determine the type of newline to be used).
Default: Windows
If you want to limit the extraction to a time period, select the start of the period - otherwise leave untouched (=start at the very beginning). (If your browser does not support this HTML element, yet, you can type the date manually using these instructions: http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.compound.php)
Default: "empty"
If you want to limit the extraction to a time period, select the end of the period - otherwise leave untouched (=extract until the very end). (If your browser does not support this HTML element, yet, you can type the date manually using these instructions: http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.compound.php)
Default: "empty"
If you limited extraction by a time period, you need to specify your phone's timezone (see list of timezones here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php), so the timestamps can be matched correctly. If left blank, UTC will be used.
Default: UTC