Corporations
A retained record of business conducted over iMessage, held on your own hardware.
The problem
Staff conduct real business in iMessage: approvals, quotes, customer promises. macOS can be set to delete messages after 30 days or a year, and that setting is easy to flip without noticing. When a dispute or an audit arrives, the record is already gone, and there is no vendor to ask for it.
Why Message Vault helps
- Archives the Messages database on each Mac on a schedule, before any retention window closes.
- Every source is opened read-only. The app has no delete operation.
- A hash-chained manifest lets you show the archive has not been altered since it was sealed.
- The vault stays on a drive you control. No cloud vendor holds a copy unless you choose the encrypted backup, and the key stays in your Keychain.
- Full-text search across the whole archive, with a coverage view that shows where the gaps are.
How to do it
- Install Message Vault on each Mac whose messages you need to retain and grant Full Disk Access.
- Point each vault at storage you control, then run the first scan and enable the schedule.
- Seal the manifest at each review point and record its chain head where your compliance process expects it.
Message Vault reads the Messages database on a Mac and the iPhone backups made on that Mac with Finder or iTunes. It does not pull messages from a phone over the air. The manifest proves the archive has not changed since it was sealed. It does not prove the archive was complete or truthful at that moment, and its timestamp is the Mac’s own clock, not a trusted time source. It is not a certified forensic tool and we make no claim about whether a court will accept what it produces. That is a question for your attorney.
$29 per year, per Mac. 14-day free trial. Cancel any time. Requires macOS 14 or later.
Other use cases: Family memories · Executive teams · Legal cases · Custody disputes · Estate and executors · Journalists and researchers · Switching Macs or phones · macOS deleted my messages · Small business owners