I realized a while ago that my text messages and iMessages aren't backed up. Sure Apple keeps a copy for themselves, but they give you no easy way to keep a copy of them for yourself. That's silly. I should be able to easily keep a copy of my own text messages stored where and how I'd like. Not to mention there are some old conversations taking up space on my iPhone. Consider iOS now takes over 10GB of hard drive space to run, and it needs some ridiculous amount of free space to run an update (Ranting about that bloat is a different topic) freeing up all the space these old conversations take up would be useful.

Well again Apple doesn't just provide this for some reason and it looks like the software available to Windows all costs a lot of money, and honestly I can't even tell if the software is a scam or not. From what I can find online it seems like most people recommend the easiest way to be downloading the conversations as .PDF files from iMessage in macOS. It's free and easy, which sounds great. My only set back is I don't have a macOS device. And that's even more expensive than buying the scam software.

As I mentioned, this project has been on my back burner for some time, slowly just churning it over in my head on how I'd like to tackle it. Well I came across this Docker-OSX project on GitHub. It describes itself like this:

Run macOS VM in a Docker! Run near native OSX-KVM in Docker! X11 Forwarding! CI/CD for OS X Security Research! Docker mac Containers.

That's fantastic! I know there's been a whole bunch of different hackintosh projects over the year, but this looks so much more promising!

Verify System Requirements

They list the following system requirements:

20GB+++ disk space for bare minimum installation (50GB if using Xcode)
virtualization should be enabled in your BIOS settings
a x86_64 kvm-capable host
at least 50GB for :auto (half for the base image, half for your runtime image)

That's all easy enough to work with. They have a number of walkthroughs available in their documentation for different environment setups. I think I'm going to follow the one for Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Steps performed on desktop via Windows Subsystem for Linux

kvm-ok
- INFO: /dev/kvm exists
- KVM acceleration can be used

Cool, well it looks like I meet the requirements and can proceed.

Install Dependencies

Steps performed on desktop via Windows Subsystem for Linux

sudo apt -y install bridge-utils cpu-checker libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon qemu qemu-kvm

Steps performed on desktop

It then has me install Docker Desktop for Windows and as that completes it requires a reboot. Well I'll plan to reboot when I'm done at my computer and I'll come back to this another day.