Thanks for those great tools recs. Had never seen mvt before and I'm running a check of my local iTunes backup with it now! (Funnily, this seems one of the easier ways to backup my text message history into an easily searchable form)
MVT takes a (MACB) timeline of your phone backup file changes and other events - including your text message history.
Here is a simple script that I wrote converts it into a format compatible with Timesketch [2] so it's trivial to explore events from the phone, indexed and searchable by time, kind of what you would see in Kibana.