Browsing messages, contacts and data types in an iPhone backup
How to search the extracted messages, make a PDF transcript from them, save attachments, take contacts into the person master, and view the other data types.
You can browse the content of a processed iPhone backup inside the system: SMS and iMessage messages, contacts and the other data types (call history, calendar, device data). From the selected part you can make a PDF that goes into the document centre, and you can take contacts into the person master.
Messages
- Open Document → iPhone backups and click the message icon (two speech bubbles) in the backup's row.
- If messages have not been read yet, click Read messages; reading runs in the background.
- Filter with Phone number, Conversation, Message text, Direction, From, To, Person and How much to show. Names come from the contacts and the person master; attachments and persons are shown as links if you have access to them.
- Save attachments to the document centre moves the attachments to the document centre in the background.
- Transcript to PDF makes a chronological PDF with attachments from the filtered (or selected) messages and saves it in the document centre.
- Import contact cards takes the contact cards attached to messages into the person master in the background; if there are none, the system says so.
Contacts
- On the backup's contact screen filter with Name / organization / number; Only entries with a name and a contact detail hides incomplete entries.
- Take one contact over with Import into the person master, several with Import selected. The system looks for an existing person by phone number or e-mail, or creates a new one, and links the contact details.
- For an imported contact, Open in the person master takes you to the person's record.
Phone numbers and e-mail addresses that cannot be accepted are listed in a warning. Importing also needs the permission to create persons.
Other data types
- Click the backup's data type link (Open the extracted records) to open the list of that data type, for example the call history.
- Filter with Search, From and To.
- Generate PDF saves a full PDF of the filtered set in the document centre; view it with Open in the document centre.
Example
For a contract dispute Sample Ltd. needs the SMS exchange between Peter Szabó and a client in spring 2026. They type the client's number into Phone number, 1 March and 31 May into From and To, and click Transcript to PDF. The PDF of 86 messages goes into the document centre and can be forwarded from there.