Saving voicemails is important. For various reasons, from legal issues to saving a loved one’s voice, people sometimes need to save voicemails. And they should be able to, right? Well, almost every U.S. cell phone provider deletes voicemails after a certain period of time – from 14 to 30 days. They’re your voicemails, so why are you letting your carrier determine which to delete?
On top of that, iPhone users don’t even have an option to save or forward voicemails despite how “smart” it is. So I’ve created this guide on how to save your iPhone voicemails permanently. It’ll take you five simple steps to complete, and it doesn’t even require jailbreaking your device.
What You’ll Need
One
Just like we’ve used in the past, we’re going to use a piece of software called iBackupBot to extract the voicemails from your iPhone backups. With that being said, sync your iPhone with iTunes to obtain an up-to-date copy of your iPhone’s backup.
Two
Download and install iBackupBot for Windows or Mac OS X. When you first open it, iBackupBot will automatically search your computer for all the iDevice backups you have created in the past. We’re only concerned with the latest iPhone backup, so click yours in the left sidebar.
Three
iBackupBot will take some time to load the backup, but once it does you’ll see a list of files that it can extract from the backup. Since we’re only looking for voicemails, scroll down to Library/Voicemail/. Depending on the amount of voicemails you have on your iPhone, iBackupBot will list a number of .amr files. These are your individual voicemails that you’ll need to copy over.
It will be difficult to identify who left you each voicemail using iBackupBot, so you’ll have to extract all the voicemails in bulk unless you’re certain which voicemail is which. Check off each voicemail you want to extract and then click the Export button in the top left menu as seen below.
Four
iBackupBot now wants to know what you want to extract. Select the “Export only checked file(s)” button. Also, uncheck the box next to “Export with backup information, for import to another backup” unless you are planning to import these voicemails into another backup with iBackupBot. Press OK and choose where you want to save the voicemails on your computer.
Five
Now that you’ve extracted the voicemails, you can choose to keep them in the standard .amr format (which QuickTime can play) or you can convert them to a more conventional format like MP3. If you’re comfortable with uploading your voicemails to an online service, I suggest using Online-Convert’s service (seen below) because it’s easy to use.
Otherwise, if you have privacy concerns, you can download and install MP3 conversion software to your computer and convert the voicemails that way. I suggest using Audacity (it’s free!) for converting the files on your computer.
That’s all there is to it! Once you get in a habit of saving your voicemails, you’ll never have a deleted voicemail again. If this seems like too much work to you, the alternative (and better, in my opinion) is using Google Voice – a service that automatically emails you every voicemail you receive (with a transcription, too!) and will never delete them.
How do you save your iPhone voicemails? How does the above method compare? Let us know in the comments below!
