Message Keeper has no server and no account. Your messages stay on your own devices, moving only through your personal iCloud. This page explains exactly how.
The archiver runs entirely on your Mac. It reads your Messages database and writes the bundle locally. The only thing that ever leaves your machine is the bundle syncing to your own iCloud Drive.
Your Messages database and attachments are opened read-only and immutable. The app never writes to ~/Library/Messages/ and never deletes an attachment — full stop.
No analytics, no crash reporting to third parties, no network calls — except iCloud sync, which happens directly between your own Apple devices and is end-to-end encrypted by iCloud.
Every attachment is SHA-256 verified before the archive is promoted. Path containment ensures a tampered database can't drive reads outside your Attachments folder, and the reader refuses bundles it doesn't understand.
None. Message Keeper has no backend, no analytics SDK, and no account system. We never see your messages, your contacts, your attachments, or any usage data, because none of it is ever sent to us — there is no "us" on the network at all.
Your archive bundle is stored in your own iCloud Drive, in a container tied to your Apple ID. It syncs between your devices the same way your photos and notes do — end-to-end encrypted by iCloud, under your control. You can move, copy, or delete the bundle at any time using the Files app or Finder.
To read your message history, the Mac app requires Full Disk Access, a macOS permission you grant explicitly in System Settings. With it, the app reads:
~/Library/Messages/chat.db (read-only, immutable).~/Library/Messages/Attachments/ (read-only).The app never modifies, deletes, or transmits any of this. It writes only the new archive bundle.
The reader is read-only — the same code on Mac and iPhone. It opens the bundle from your iCloud container and displays it, and makes no network requests of its own; it relies entirely on iCloud's sync of your own files.
Because the app collects no data, this policy is unlikely to change in substance. If it ever does, the updated version will be posted here.
Local on the Mac, read-only against your data, synced only through your own iCloud. That's the whole story.
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