Safe by design
The archiver never touches your live Messages database. It takes a clean, WAL-free snapshot, mounts it read-only and immutable, and writes only to a temporary file that's verified before it's promoted. Your original history is never modified — that guarantee is non-negotiable.
Feels like Messages
Right-aligned blue bubbles for you, grey for everyone else. Sender names in group chats, date separators, reactions, edited and unsent markers. It reads like the app you already know — because that's the point. The same reader runs on both platforms: a three-pane, Mail-style window on Mac, a single-column thread you swipe through on iPhone.
Find anything, instantly
A full-text index (SQLite FTS5) spans every message in every chat. Search a word, a phrase, or a partial — matched terms are highlighted in your results, and tapping one jumps straight to that message in its thread. Type freely: punctuation never trips the search.
Did you ever find that photo from the lake house?
The lake house weekend was the best part of the year
One file you own
Everything lives in a single archive.imarchive — a SQLite database, a tar of every attachment, and a manifest. The schema is frozen and versioned: future versions add only, and older readers refuse to misread a newer bundle. It's portable, inspectable, and yours.
├── archive.sqlite — messages + FTS5
├── attachments.tar — every file
└── manifest.json — counts + hash