anyone successfully backed up & moved 13,000 texts from one phone to another?

[bennetthaselton]

I have a phone with about 13,000 saved sms messages that I need to copy to another phone. (Some of these I need to keep for professional reasons and some I want to keep for personal reasons, and it's going to take way to long to triage them all, so can we not have the thread hi-jacked by a bunch of buttheads saying I don't really need to keep all those messages. This is what happened in every other forum thread that I've found with Google, where someone asked how to migrate a large number of texts. If you're a helpful person who genuinely likes assisting people in forums, keep reading!)

Has anyone ever successfully used a program that backed up about that many SMS messages to a file, and then restored the messages to another phone from that file?

I tried the first six apps listed in the app store under "SMS Backup", and none of them worked:
- "SMS Backup+ by Jan Berkel" and "SMS Backup by Christoph Studer" both back up messages to your Gmail account (which takes hours, with this many); I'm looking for programs that back up to a local file
- "SMS Backup & Restore by Ritesh Sahu", "Super Backup", "SMS Backup & Restore by MDroid Apps" and "SMS Backup & Restore by InfoLife LLC" all *start* to restore messages at a decent speed (ranging from 10+ messages per second to several hundred, depending on the program), but then reach a threshold where they slow to a crawl and the count of the restored messages goes up by 1 every few seconds. I'm also trying to restore the messages to an LG Optimus F6 which doesn't have a lot of memory, but that shouldn't affect the ability of a good program to restore the messages. (Possibly the programs are storing previously restored messages in memory, and that's why they slow down after getting part of the way through the restore, but if they had been written to handle large loads properly, they wouldn't keep messages in memory after restoring them, so the 10,000th message should restore just as quickly as the first one.)

Has anyone had better luck with a different program, for a similar large number of messages?

 

[Paul627g]

Hello,

To be honest I think what your trying to do is showing the thresholds of the many different apps you have tried. My suggestion would be to archive some of the messages into separate files using SMS Backup and Restore or others by date or the other options they have. Then if need be you can restore or review these messages when necessary. I think no matter what app you try your going to continue to run into problems trying to move such a mass amount of messages and I don't think you can really point to the developers for failing here because you probably are in a very small percent of folks that accumulate and keep such a massive log of messages.

Good luck

 

[srkmagnus]

I'm not sure that you are rooted or not, but if you are, have you tried Titanium Backup?

If you are not rooted try Helium App Sync and Backup. Helium requires use of a desktop client for non-rooted users.

Hopefully one of those options will work for you.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Assuming each is a 10 kb file size, we are talking 126 MB. Now this is a poor assumption as there are most likely picture and video messages as well. It doesn't really come down to size, it is volume. Although, a device with low internal memory doesn't help much either.

I would personally suggest to cut the number down and try backing them up again.

 

[Vsweety]

Hello,

To be honest I think what your trying to do is showing the thresholds of the many different apps you have tried. My suggestion would be to archive some of the messages into separate files using SMS Backup and Restore or others by date or the other options they have. Then if need be you can restore or review these messages when necessary. I think no matter what app you try your going to continue to run into problems trying to move such a mass amount of messages and I don't think you can really point to the developers for failing here because you probably are in a very small percent of folks that accumulate and keep such a massive log of messages.

Good luck

Agreed.
The Instant Messaging concept was conceived to send and receive short, fleeting notes. IMs are like digital post-it notes. It was never intended for serious correspondence that can be stored in archives to last for eternity (like e.g. email or physical letters on paper). So if you amass great numbers of IMs that you want to treat as if they are 'real' correspondence – including archiving – you're likely to run into trouble.

​

Exactly the same as SMS/MMS, BTW.

 

[TheMacs]

Agree... I'd say your best bet is to archive. Then review/clean up in a PC app with much more robust processing power and search/sort abilities. Keep your original archive, and import your trimmed down arhive to a local (on device) or cloud file. Good luck.