At Home with Tech

Are you tired of staring at your iPhone’s visual voicemails and wondering how to easily rescue them for your family history archiving needs? You can MacGyver them out, but iExplorer has a better solution for you!

My wife recently received her iPhone 6 Plus from UPS with great joy…
I bought it online a few hours after my 3am adventure to be among the first to preorder one.

So as a result, her Plus arrived a couple weeks after mine did.
(Actually, a few days earlier than Apple promised)

But this second Lester Plus was purchased in a much more civilized manner…
(No lengthy 3am digital dance during the first hours the new iPhone was ‘available.’)  It was just another calm 6:30am online transaction. Apple’s website was fully functioning by then, and I even had my cup of Joe within arm’s reach.

It was a snap and easily worth the extra wait for my wife’s iPhone to show up…
(I just didn’t want to chase stock availability and long lines for the next few months.)

Your Phone is a Time Machine
But before we activated my our second Plus, of course there were a few digital house-cleaning matters to attend to…

• We eliminated the apps she wasn’t using any more on her old iPhone 4
• Then deleted old voice mails, audio files and any mediocre photos
• And did a full backup of her old iPhone’s data via iTunes
  (We’d use that backup to inject into her Plus.)

While going through some of the older media, we came across a few audio files that we definitely wanted to hold onto.
They were the sounds of our son my wife recorded when he was just a baby!
(carried over from her original iPhone 3GS)

Other precious moments to save were more recent voicemails from our now four-year-old ‘little man.’

And though the switchover to a new smartphone is supposed to be seamless, you really don’t want to play around with your priceless digital memories.
Especially around Halloween, you never know what horrors will appear
(or disappear)…

So I decided I’d better export those particular audio files before initiating the iPhone upgrade.

The Easy Way or The Hard Way?
Backing up the audio recordings was easy. They sync natively to iTunes.
But the voicemails were a different story. There’s no obvious way to save voicemails out of an iPhone’s visual voicemail ecosystem.

I’ve looked at this problem before and analyzed
three different ways to rescue iPhone voicemails.

During my initial research, I touched on third-party software to crack the voicemail code, but didn’t fully focus my attentions there, because I felt you shouldn’t have to pay someone else to release your own voicemails.

And the two do-it-yourself solutions suffered from the major problem of being really slow.

Now, as a father and a busy guy overall, I think I finally acknowledge that a faster solution is worth a few bucks.

iExplorer to the Rescue
So after a little more Googling, I took a closer look at iExplorer, a robust utility that allows you to easily export your files and media from your iPhone or iPad.
And yes, it also gives you easy access to those important voicemails and text messages you want to save…

So I proceeded to pony up $35 and downloaded the desktop software.

I plugged in my wife’s old iPhone…
Bam!
There were the voicemails we wanted.
Click.
Now, they’re in a new folder on my computer!
Click.
Next, I initiated a Time Machine backup.

And our precious voicemail files were speedily saved and backed up.
That was easy…

Now, to the task of activating my wife’s iPhone 6 Plus…!

Only Now, at the End, Do You Understand…
So is thirty-five bucks too much to shell out for a computer functionality you think should be free?

Yes, it’s a pretty penny, especially when you’re used to dropping only 99 cents on a new app.

But how much did you just spend on that new iPhone?
And look at all that time iExplorer just saved you.
And isn’t the price of dinner worth ensuring the safety of these priceless digital additions to your family history archive?

As my dad likes to say,
(which his father told him)
“You don’t get old for nothing!”

Thirty-five clams?
I’d pay twice as much…!