How To Save Your Treasured #Voicemail Messages
Your mission is to learn how to back up all of those voicemail messages you’ve been saving and resaving, so that you can keep them safe and sound without worrying about losing them.
When we first started writing our books, I was really surprised to hear how many people have old voicemails on their phones and answering machines that they keep resaving over and over again for sentimental reasons.
For some people it’s the news of a new arrival to the family, or a job offer they’d been waiting for. For others it’s the last message or the old voicemail greeting of a loved one who’s passed away. The problem with trying to save voicemail messages this way, is that one hiccup from a cell phone carrier or badly timed power outage and that message will be gone forever.
That’s what happened to one woman. When her fifteen year old son unexpectedly died in his sleep, she couldn’t bear to erase the greeting on his cell phone’s voicemail. So she kept his phone and service, just so she could call every once in a while to hear his voice. Until one day when her cell phone carrier changed storage systems and lost his voicemail greeting.
She was absolutely beside herself.
Thankfully, weeks later, the cell phone carrier found the greeting, put it on a CD and sent it to her. But when a recording is THAT important, you can’t just leave it up to chance, hoping that it never gets erased. And backing it up is so easy to do, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it months ago!
Do you have a message that you want to save?
Well the first thing you have to do is to figure out what method is best.
Usually old messages are in one of three places.
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Your smartphone or cell phone’s voicemail
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A digital answering machine or landline voicemail system
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Or an answering machine that uses a cassette tape
Let’s Start With Your Android Smartphone’s Voicmail
In general, most Android smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy or LG have an option within the voicemail to save the message to your Dropbox, iCloud or One Drive. That’s the easiest method, because your phone will save the recording for you, usually as an MP3.
Or you can save the file and email it to yourself.
Once the file is on your computer, store the message to your backup files as well as a portable hard drive for safe keeping.
Saving A Voicmail From Your iPhone
Saving a voicemail on your iPhone is simple. In fact, it’s as easy as sharing a photo.
Click on the voicemail you want to save.
Tap the share button on the upper right corner of your screen. Then choose where you want to save it.
You can email it to yourself, save it to your files (including iCloud) or to other file sharing services like Dropbox. In this instance, I decided to save it to iCloud.
At the top you’ll see that your voicemail is about to be saved as an MP4 file. Just choose the file where you want to save it and tap “add”. That’s it, your voicemail is saved!
Why did I choose iCloud? Because it’s a great way to save your voicemail in multiple locations. More locations means less of a chance the voicemail will accidentally be deleted. Not only does saving your voicemail to iCloud mean you’ve saved your message to the cloud, but from there, you can download it to your Mac or PC, transfer it to one or more portable hard drives or flash drives. You can even email it to other locations or other people for safekeeping.
If the message you want to save is someone’s voicemail greeting, you won’t be able to save it by sharing it. In that case, the best way to save it is to play it out loud on speakerphone and record it using a tape or audio recorder. See that section below for details.
What If You Have An Older Cell Phone That Doesn’t Let You Save Your Messages As Files?
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You can turn it into an MP3 (we’ll cover this one in a minute)
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Or you can call your cellphone carrier and ask them how to download a voice mail from your particular phone.
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Or you can play the message on speakerphone and record it onto a digital recorder as an MP3
What if Your Message Is On A Cassette Tape?
