iMazing – The Amazingly Easy Way To Export Text Messages Off Your iPhone, Plus Backup Your Devices And Transfer Files!

iMazing – The Amazingly Easy Way To Export Text Messages Off Your iPhone, Plus Backup Your Devices And Transfer Files!

Today’s app is not really an “app” for your iPhone or iPad, but it’s a piece of software (an application) that runs on your Mac or Windows PC, and works directly with your iPhone or iPad called iMazing.

iMazing generously supplied me with a copy of this $45 piece of software, but in complete honesty the timing was perfect since I had been looking to find a better alternative to iTunes for backing up my iPhone, and transferring files.

For the purpose of today’s video, I’m only going to focus on 3 of the features found in iMazing:

  1. Backups for iPhone and iPad
  2. File transfer capabilities
  3. Accessing, exporting, downloading, and preserving text messages (and Whatsapp messages too!)

I’ve long recommended that attorneys and other professionals use the iTunes software to create local backups of their iOS devices, and use the iTunes software to copy large files from their computer to their iPhone or iPad.

The iTunes software has been around since 2001 and it had become a fixture on Windows and Mac computers … until June 2019 when Apple announced they were retiring the historic, free software.

But actually, that’s only true for macOS … at least for now. The iTunes software for Windows is apparently staying around. And even on the Mac with the latest OS version called Catalina, while the official iTunes software is going away, it’s functionality is getting split up into multiple apps including Music, TV, and Podcasts. The backup and file transfer capabilities are now built into the Finder.

So that’s what prompted me to find a replacement for iTunes in managing iOS devices, and iMazing was always one of the most-discussed pieces of software do this. Plus it does so much more!

#1: Backups

The first step before you can do any of the cool stuff with iMazing, is to perform a backup of your iPhone and/or iPad.

By default, iOS devices will backup to iCloud every night and this is fantastic, and HIGHLY recommended … but it is ALSO highly recommended that you have a LOCAL backup in addition to your iCloud backup!

To generate a backup, you’ll need to connect your iOS device to your computer with a USB cable.

Now depending on your computer settings, this might open up the iTunes software, but you can just close that since we’ll be using iMazing instead. If this is the first time that you’ve connected your device to a computer, you may have to tap the “Trust” button before you can proceed.

One of the best features in making a backup in iMazing is that you can choose the location on your computer or external storage where you want the backup to be stored – something you could NOT do with iTunes.

You’ll be encouraged to create a backup the first time you launch iMazing and you won’t be able to access very much through iMazing UNTIL you create a backup, so you might as well do this right off the bat. And that first backup may take some time, so don’t be alarmed at this.

Here’s the iMazing (amazing) part … once you successfully perform a backup with a USB cable, the iMazing software automatically turns on the Wi-Fi connection – and you’ll see a wi-fi symbol next to your device to that effect (your iPhone must be wirelessly connected to the same network that your computer is on).

#2: Transferring Files

Now you can wirelessly generate backups with iMazing, but you can now also easily (and wirelessly) https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-connect-your-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-touch-to-your-mac-or-pc-computer-over-wi-fi transfer files from your computer to your iOS device.

First you may not think this is necessary, since you can easily connect to Dropbox, or a dozen other cloud-based storage services to transfer files. And while that is absolutely the best way I recommend accessing and managing your files, there are some times when you haves files on your computer that you just need to copy over quickly. Some firms and companies I’ve worked with don’t allow connections to Dropbox, and then there are times when you want to transfer large video files to your iPad, and it would take a long time to download over the Internet.

So you can see here I’m accessing iMazing on my Mac, and it’s connected to my iPad over wi-fi as you can see by the symbol here.

Now when I go into Files, and go to the GoodReader app www.goodreader.com in the iMazing software, I can drag a file from my computer over to iMazing, and you’ll see it immediately copies that file into the GoodReader app on my iPad. And here you see that I can access that file in the GoodReader app on my iPad.

Let’s say that I need to copy over a large video file to the TrialPad app to show at a hearing or presentation …

So I’ll go down to TrialPad https://www.litsoftware.com/trialpad in the iMazing software (on my Mac), then drag a video, and several other files over to the TrialPad app in iMazing. It then copies those files over to my iPad.

Now when I pick up my iPad, and go into TrialPad, you’ll see that it notifies me there are new files. I can tap that, select the files, and tell TrialPad which case I want them to be put into. Now I can go into the case and pull up those files. Easy!

#3: Export Text Messages Off Your iPhone!

Now to get to one of the best features of iMazing www.imazing.com for lawyers and everyone else … this software will easily let you access, search, download, and export text messages.

First, I see many lawyers text messaging with their clients these days, mostly because the clients insist upon it, and we don’t have an easy way to preserve those conversations like what we can do with email.

Second, this is the number one question I get today when I consult with lawyers on e-discovery – how do we collect, preserve, review, and produce text messages?

How do you do it now? Screenshots! You go into your Messages app, take one screenshot, scroll up, take another, scroll up, take another, etc. And then you have a whole collection of screenshots that you have to keep in order to record a conversation.

But with iMazing, once you’ve got a backup of your iPhone, you can click the Messages tab, and you will immediately see all your conversations right there.

But it gets BETTER! You can filter your list of Messages by a date range, and even search through all your messages for a word or phrase.

You can export full text message conversations as PDF, Excel, or Text files and in the case of a PDF file, it LOOKS just like the message conversation looks on your iPhone screen!!

PLUS, you can elect to “show contact details” and “show time for all messages” which is absolutely helpful when you need to authenticate the conversation in court.

You can even select specific messages in a conversation, and then just drag them off to your desktop or a folder, which instantly creates a PDF of those selected messages, and the resulting PDF shows the conversation that looks MUCH like it looks like on your iPhone, PLUS it has the related metadata associated with it!

I’ve seen a lot of different ways people attempt to preserve text messages in my e-discovery consulting work, but this is one of the best solutions I’ve found – it’s obvious that iMazing has put a LOT of work into reproducing the layout and aesthetics of the iPhone’s Messages app.

Plus, this works with WhatsApp messages as well!

Other Features of iMazing

There are many, many other features available in iMazing that I don’t have time to go through, but

  • You can easily transfer all your data from old iPhone to new one
  • You can easily copy over ringtones, etc.
  • You can easily download your voicemail messages
  • You can easily select multiple pictures in photos so you can export or delete them off your iPhone
  • You can export your list of contacts,
  • You can access your Notes

There is so much you can do with iMazing that allows me to highly recommend the software for any attorney using an iPhone or iPad. It’s a great accompanying piece of software that allows you to create local backups, easily transfer files, and export your text message conversations.

A single license of iMazing is $45 and you can pay a little more to be able to use it on multiple computers. I’ll have the link below for getting more information.

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