I recently had a run-in where copies of sent and received text messages between me and someone else, plus a voicemail were required to clear up an issue. I thought about how this would be possible. Maybe I could try and dig through the backups iTunes makes? Hand transcription of the text conversations was also a thought, along with trying to record the voicemail using the built in microphone on my computer. Neither of these sounded very pleasant. Then I remembered that ages ago, I got ecamm’s PhoneView in a MacHeist bundle. This is powerful software.

Not only can you export almost everything from your iPhone (call logs, SMS records, contacts, web histories, etc), it also let’s you use it as an external drag and drop hard disk (but only PhoneView will be able to see the files existence)! Some interesting features include the ability to play music off your device, edit/create/save “Notes” (used by the official Apple Notes application), and deletion capabilities.

While I’d never advocate music theft, if you ever need to pull music or videos from your iPhone, this software will do that too. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been called on to rescue lost music from friends’ iPods. With this utility, media is just as accessible as an iPod in Hard Disk mode.

Simply select the category of data want to remove, click “Copy from iPhone” and viola, the data is extracted to the directory of your choice. The file formats are standards too, so you will not need any funky software to open anything.

If having your own personal backups of iPhone data is important to you, I’d look into PhoneView.

PhoneView, from Ecamm