Reformed Jailbreaker seeks Selective Restore

[techiechick]

I currently have a 6sPlus - I have already ordered an Xs. Hopefully it will be here Friday. So this is in preparation of getting the new phone.

Back in the 4s & 5s days I was a huge fan of Jailbreaking. I may have even jailbroken my 6s at one time - I truly don't remember anymore. Anyway - due to large amounts of data, and a general laziness, I have always just restored from backup when I get a new phone. I know this isn't the best practice (especially after jailbreaking) and I have always suspected there were various "system hooks" still in place from the jailbreaks due to weird phantom issues with my 6sPlus.

When the Xs arrives, I want to set it up from scratch without restoring the backup to get the best performance. However, I would like to keep or restore ONLY the SMS/iMessages. Is that possible? I see quite a few third party apps that advertise they can do it... so i wanted to find out:
Have any of you ever used any of these? Was it successful?
If so, which one did you use?

 

[Lee_Bo]

Chances are you won't be able to restore from backup anyway unless you were using iOS 12 beta. If you weren't then all your backups were iOS 11 and I believe the new devices are all shipping with 12. You can't restore a 11 backup on 12, and vice versa.

With that being said, as far as iMessage goes, as soon as you log into your new device with your Apple ID, all your iMessages should be available.

I've never used any SMS backup app so I can't speak on that. Sorry. Hopefully someone else will come along that has done that.