How to preserve your precious voice mail messages
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For some people, important — and even downright precious — messages only live on in the form of voice mails. Here’s how to preserve them just in case anything ever happens to your phone or phone service.
- Open the Phone app and tap Voicemail.
- Find the voice mail you want to save and click it.
- Tap the square share icon in the top-right corner.
- Send a copy of the recording via email, AirDrop, iCloud Drive upload — whatever you prefer.
- Open the Phone app and select your voice mail. If your phone has a separate voice mail app, open that instead.
- Find the voice mail you want to preserve and tap it.
- Tap the share icon, which looks like three dots connected by two lines.
- Send a copy of the recording via email, Google Drive — whatever you prefer.
Note: Because Android phone makers customize their devices differently, the process for yours may vary from these instructions. If that’s the case for you, let us know.
Turn on your speakerphone, play the voice mail and record it on another device. Many smartphones or tablets have built-in voice memo or recorder apps that you can use free. As for laptops, they almost certainly have a built-in microphone — you just need the right software. We recommend using the free app Audacity for Windows or Mac’s built-in QuickTime Player to record the audio.
If you want your saved voice mail to sound as good as possible, you’ll have to connect your phone directly to your computer with an audio cable.
For many newer flip phones, you can use a common auxiliary cable — it has a standard 3.5mm headphone plug on each end. (You might already have one if you’ve ever connected your phone or MP3 player to your car stereo.) If your phone is older, it might only accept a tiny, 2.5mm jack, but don’t worry: 2.5mm-to-3.5mm cables are still easy to find.
Once you have your cable, plug one end into your phone and the other into your computer’s microphone port — you can usually spot these by looking for a headphone jack with small microphone icon or pink trim.
Then fire up your recording app of choice and pick your phone as the “input.”
In Audacity, your phone (possibly going by the name “microphone” or “microphone array”) should appear in the drop-down menu next to the microphone icon. If you’re using QuickTime on a Mac, click File, then New Audio Recording, then click the small down-facing arrow icon next to the record button and select your phone.
Finally, start the recording by clicking the big red button, then press play on the voice mail on your phone. If everything came together correctly, you’ll now have a high-quality copy of that precious voice message.
Once you’ve recorded the voice mail on the device of your choice, save it (sometimes this happens automatically) and put it somewhere for safekeeping.
No matter how you save a copy of those voice mails, we recommend putting them in more than one place — say, your computer, an external drive and in cloud storage — just to be safe.
