Your messages live in a file on your computer, not on your phone. Open backscroll.co on a desktop and it takes about twenty seconds.
Pick the three people you text most. Backscroll reads your message history inside this browser tab and finds the conversations you would never scroll back far enough to see again.
🖥️ Made for Mac. This will not work on mobile.
Backscroll scores every day you have ever spent talking to someone, then sorts what it finds. You pick the mood.
The night it got stupid. Caps lock, crying-laughing, replies four seconds apart.
The ones that still land. Goodnights, I'm proud of you, things said at 1am.
The very first thing the two of you ever said to each other.
The final thing the two of you ever said to each other.
The longest message in the whole thread. Nobody types that much unless it matters.
The ones that only happen when neither of you can sleep.
Months of silence, and then one of you finally broke it.
When one of you was not okay, and the other one showed up.
Your Mac already keeps every iMessage in one file. You never have to open it, type anything, or install anything — you just hand it to this page.
It sits between View and Window. In the menu that drops down, click Go to Folder… at the bottom.
A folder opens. You will see a file called chat.db.
chat.db down onto this pageIt is roughly a gigabyte, and dragging it here does not move it, copy it, or change it. Nothing is uploaded.
There is a mouse-only route. Open Finder, hold down the option key,
and click Go in the menu bar. A folder called Library appears in
the list that is normally hidden. Click it, then open the Messages folder
inside, and drag chat.db onto this page.
If you see several files whose names start with chat.db, you want the
one called exactly chat.db — not chat.db-wal or
chat.db-shm.
or click to choose it — nothing leaves this tab
reading your archive…
Name them, and say who they are to you. Backscroll looks for different things in a conversation with your partner than with your dad.
Name at least one to continue.