How to recover all stored text message data on old iPhone (A1241) to external drive?

For anyone not bound by the strict “no third party” requirement - go get a copy of Phone View.

• http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

It does everything asked for and you can use it on all devices for one license. The free trial let’s you install and be sure it will work before paying for the software.

If I discover a way to get started or accomplish this using only Apple terminal and free Mac App Store apps, I’ll edit that in here as well. I would start with Apple Configurator and the command line tools it installs since that can read log files and get past the “trust” steps that iTunes and iCloud typically perform when getting data from iOS to macOS.