Here in this modern world, you talk to your friends over all kinds of different media: SMS, Facebook, Twitter DMs, GChat, and maybe even AIM if you're really old. These conversations aren't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever. You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day. Unfortunately, you and your friends have become beholden to third-party corporations who don't give a shit about preserving your data. That's because you're not the customer, you're the product. You already knew that, but you go along with it anyway, because frankly you don't have much choice. I've fixed that for you. Mostly. Here's what I've got: sms-backup-iphone ~/Documents/SMS\ Messages/ This extracts the SMSes from your iPhone backup database, and saves them to a local directory. This only works if you back up your iPhone to "This Computer" rather than to iCloud. facebook-rss.pl --messages $USER […more…]