sms backup

pglushkov

Hi everybody!
And another question regarding backing things up Is there some 'user-friendly' way to back-up all my SMS/MMS ? I could find any app for that, nor such an option in 'messages' app setups or something alike. Right now I'm not interested in moving all my data to some new phone, I'm interested in externally storing my messages history and accessing it by some way. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

flohack

You will be able to use my backup module in the magic device tool, but its still in closed beta testing. For the time being, use rsync -afz --delete /home/phablet/ username@server:target_folder/ and vice versa to restore. All the magic is in /home/phablet. Except some system settings like ringtones, background pictures etc.

BR Florian

pglushkov

Florian,
thank you for the advice, but exporting whole /home/phablet without knowing where to search for the actual SMS texts is not what I was looking for Is there any option to export SMS's into a text file or an XML or smth similar in any way?

flohack

There is no official export function, so you would need to scan the folder .config/com.ubuntu.messaging-app or how it is called maybe you can find out what they are doing.

BR

pglushkov

Ok, I see. Thank you for your time!

pglushkov

Ok, so what I could find so far:

Following this link ( https://askubuntu.com/questions/601950/import-sms-mms-on-ubuntu-touch ) , I've copied this 'history.sqlite' file from ~/.local/share/history-service/ directory to my PC.
This file cannot be accessed via File Manager, so either use Terminal application and mangle through typing commands or use connection via SSH or smth similar
I examined this 'history.sqlite' with DB Browser for SQLite app ( http://sqlitebrowser.org ), in this DB you can find table called 'text_events' - this is basically your SMS's.

Not a user friendly way, but hey, watcha gonna do If you're an expert in bash/SQL - I bet you can write a script to export all the SMS's less painfully. MB some code in Python could do as well - I bet there are some bindings to SQLite in it. This is for the 'export' part.

'Import' would be much more trickier I guess, cause you probably will have to account for inner structure of this database - who knows which data is binded to which or where it is referred (tables, triggers, procedures). Some experimentation is necessary to find out for sure.

Hope this will help somebody except me

UKPhil

I remember bringing this up (a user friendly back-up tool) on the ask Ubuntu forum and I think I even logged a launchpad for it too. At the time I was looking for something gui side like "Lucky Backup" or something like that. Fear of loosing my data after my only hdd failed with all family photos, always rides high on my mind. I was told that there is nothing at present. However, with the magic tool it sounds like there is an option of sorts, even if not a fancy gui one

advocatux

@Phil-UK, in the good ol'days of Ubuntu Phone (haha) there was Buds.

https://github.com/popey/buds