The Problem:
Sometime last week, several--but not all--of my text messages disappeared from both Google Hangouts and my native SMS app. Only recent texts went missing, while past messages from those same people were visible in the Contact History. I noticed for two reasons: 1) my incoming messages after last Monday all were basically new threads and the previous texts with those individuals/groups were gone, and 2) I needed to keep a record of a particular thread with my ex who became abusive in the case that I would need to file a restraining order. He is bright, but borderline which means he's unstable. I am anxious about having lost those texts with him and also insatiably curious, which is why I'm posting here.
Sidenote: Yes, I have heard of SMS Backup & Restore. No, I did not use it before. Yes, I plan to use it in the future.
My Phone Details:
Samsung Galaxy S3 (SGH-T999L)
Android version 4.3
Baseband version T999LUVUBNF4
Sidenote: I know missing texts is a known issue with this phone, so if that is what you think it is after reading this, please tell me. However, it's bothersome to me because all threads before 3/23 disappeared from my SMS app, BUT I can still see *some* (but not all!) texts by looking through my contact history. Also bothersome is that on 3/20, I told my ex (by text) that if he did not stop contacting me, I would file a restraining order. Of course this mysterious loss of data could be completely coincidental, too.
What I've Tried So Far
1. I tried to use Dr.Fone software to find the lost messages. It got stuck at the "Analyzing Device" screen, so no luck there.
2. Yesterday, I rooted my phone after poring over this website for several hours. I used CF Autoroot. Although I was unsuccessful at using adb commands on both my phone (Terminal Emulator) and computer (SDK), I was able to navigate the root directories using ROM Toolbox Pro (Hallelujah! That process was driving me crazy!).
3. I looked at all the "mmssms.db" databases (/databases/com.android.providers.telephony/mmssms.db) - no luck. It only contained the recent messages that are visible in the SMS app.
4. I discovered that I could see older text messages by looking through the Contact History (View Contact > History). Many threads were deleted all the way back to 2014, but 1 thread still had texts from 3/22/15. So, I went on the hunt and discovered "logs.db" (/databases/com.sec.android.provider.logsprovider/logs.db).
5. In logs.db, I could see up to 1000 rows with the names of people, including those people whose threads were deleted. Their names and numbers are all present and accounted for, but when I view the M_Content column, I see a bunch of blank spaces where text content should be, all the way back until April of 2014 (with the exception of the thread with 2 texts on 3/22/15).
Other Strange Happenings
This could be selective memory, but in the last week my phone has been acting very strangely, turning off spontaneously, even when charged, and getting lots of error messages (Sorry, X App must close).
The Chicken Or The Egg
What do you think? Is my phone glitching and therefore I lost the data, or did I lose the data, perhaps by some nefarious means, and therefore my phone is glitching? Does this sound like a typical data loss situation to you?
Final Caveats
Please use layman's terms. I am not an expert by any stretch, so the more jargon used to advise, the more hours I will spend trying to discern what you are trying to tell me.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Related
Well.. I seemed to have somehow solved my SMS bug accidentally. I was suffering from it from day 1 when I restored my 2000+ messages. I gave up on trying to tweak it, and decided to concentrate on moving my picture MMSes over from my Diamond.
(along the way I concluded none of the backup softwares can really work with picture MMSes.. but that's another story.)
I'll state upfront I don't really know what I did that fixed the problem, but I'm very sure the problem of SMS stuck in the outbox is fixed, I seem to get all my SMSes and only my msg threads with more than 300 msgs take a while (3s - 5s?) to load.
The interface loads EVERY single msg. Doesn't anyone at HTC use MSN?
Here's what I did when I gave up with the MMSes. Something along the way solved the problem. Or maybe I got lucky.
1) deleted the messages that were previously MMSes in both inbox and sent box.
Every single one.
Didn't study much, but I realised through testing, my restored MMSes were causing some problems. In traditional mode, I could not reply to a single restored MMS, but a single restored SMS was fine. In conversation mode, conversations with restored MMSes had a lag, while those with only SMS didn't. The sent/received fields also seem screwed up somehow.
Furthermore, none of the softwares I tried using to restore couldn't bring my picture MMSes back to life. (sentimental value, else I'll just save the images)
That's why I decided to just kill all of them for now. I used Jeyo Mobile to delete those "former-MMSes" from my HD2.
2) Exited Sense by removing it from Today
BTW, this was fresh from a Hard Reset, so there's nothing else in the system.
3) Using Jeyo Mobile, deleted the (previously unseen) folder Conversations from the sms inbox
Don't know why, I keep seeing it reappear. Seems to cause problems when it's not properly indexed. the UI seems to duplicate the latest msg from each contact into it, and that'll be the start of the threads.
3) Clear the deleted items folder using Jeyo
Including manually deleting the Conversations folder that was stuck in it.
4) Back up the SMSes
I had no email, nothing in draft as the UI doesn't index them properly. Only left stuff in Inbox and Sent. I used Jeyo Mobile Companion 2.1. Feel free to try others.
5) Hard Reset
6) Restore the SMSes
Here's where it's hazy again. I might have tried alot of combis, as the UI doesn't index the msgs properly for conversations all the time. Idea was to restore and let the UI index it properly. Here's the possible permutations:
a) I might have exited Sense.
b) I might have left the HTC msging interface in traditional
c) I might have left the HTC msging interface in conversation
Chances are, it's in conversation.
I restored the msgs using Jeyo. (it's stored in a XML file, so other text based backups may work too)
-------------------------------------
I only realised that the problem is fixed a few days later, as I realised that the next few days, I got my SMS reports instantly, and I never had a SMS stuck. My newly received and sent MMSes worked perfectly too.
I'm trying not to touch that msging part of my phone now that it is working perfectly....
Just found out that HD2 I bought (at the same time) for my GF is suffering the sent/huge lag issue though. Maybe I'll try to pin point a fix using her phone. She shld have less than 50 messages, though I did back up and restore some mmses for her previously.
However as I'm about to go on a 19day tour/holiday, so I thought I'll just share my experience and maybe some experts can figure out what's wrong.
Just for your info, I'm using 1.48.707.2 (71294) WWE.
This afternoon, just after sending an SMS to the wrong person (A "Kiss" to a business partner instead of the GF... great... But this is a known Android bug, I wont even complain about this...), when I went back to the main screen of conversations most of them had disappeared and the ones left were nearly empty
Granted I have quite a lot of SMS (A few thousands) but I dare to hope the issue doesnt come from there (My old Windnows Mobile TP2 could handle 20,000 without any issue)
I hesitate between calling it a shame, or ridiculous or whatever you want to call it... But definitely unprofessional, not serious and a definitive let down for the device
It happens I am backing up my SMS with My:IQ from BestBuy and it's presently rebuilding the whole SMS history (Hopefully without losses... I don't know yet)
Am I the only one who had this issue. Is it a well known problem? If yes anything to do to avoid this to happen again ? I start to be quite worried about the safety of my data...
Alcibiade said:
This afternoon, just after sending an SMS to the wrong person (A "Kiss" to a business partner instead of the GF... great... But this is a known Android bug, I wont even complain about this...), when I went back to the main screen of conversations most of them had disappeared and the ones left were nearly empty
Granted I have quite a lot of SMS (A few thousands) but I dare to hope the issue doesnt come from there (My old Windnows Mobile TP2 could handle 20,000 without any issue)
I hesitate between calling it a shame, or ridiculous or whatever you want to call it... But definitely unprofessional, not serious and a definitive let down for the device
It happens I am backing up my SMS with My:IQ from BestBuy and it's presently rebuilding the whole SMS history (Hopefully without losses... I don't know yet)
Am I the only one who had this issue. Is it a well known problem? If yes anything to do to avoid this to happen again ? I start to be quite worried about the safety of my data...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you want peace of mind you can install SMS Backup & Restore which can backup your messages in the background on a schedule, and then purge your old SMS messages now and then. I find it extremely unlikely that you need to keep thousands of SMS messages on the phone at all times. Archiving them off will speed up the application and reduce the likelihood of you losing them.
Software isn't perfect, don't keep a single copy of something that you NEED to retain without backing it up somewhere. Personally I don't care if all of my SMS's get erased now & then for 2 reasons, I back them up, and if there's anything important, I make a note of it elsewhere.
This is the first I've heard of the problem so if it's a bug with all versions of the firmware, then it's not one I've heard of. Have you checked for an update for your device?
I am using the JME ROM
Yes it could be a bug of my firmware. However havent had any issue for weeks and this suddenly happened
I bckup everything live with My;IQ
I though t about using a second backup and your suggestion is more than welcome. My worry with My:IQ is the potential doubling of SMS (in theory it doesn't happen but... in the past I saw strange things with other softwares...) and other potential issues caused by the defects on my device side (half crashed datadase or whatever)
I agree with you on backuping... Al my data are usually saved on a RAID6 system duplicated on another external HD. My emails are duplicated in several places, etc...
Anyway I ma curious to know if others experienced the same issue or if I was just unluky (ie it's unlikely this will happen often). To be honest what worries me is less the firmware than potential interactions issues between the SMS app and some other of my apps (my:IQ or other apps, I have no idea)
Ever since the ICS upgrade, one contact's message thread refuses to open and is stuck on "O Loading" with that little circle revolving.
I downloaded go sms pro before and I was able to access his thread through that and the message count wasn't over the maximum limit per contact. I've since gone back to the stock app as he's out of the country and it's faster than go sms pro but he recently txted me and caused the problem to occur with other contacts (though a reset of the phone solves their issue)
Does anyone have a solution and failing that, advice? I should say right now that deleting his message thread is the last resort.
and HTC sensation
Android 4.0.3
Software 3.32.401.5
You could try to backup your messages (you can find some apps for that in the market), then delete all your contacts, and afterwards restore them again~
Though no idea if it will work :/
burningwipf said:
You could try to backup your messages (you can find some apps for that in the market), then delete all your contacts, and afterwards restore them again~
Though no idea if it will work :/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Aye I could try it with a contact whose messages I don't mind losing and seeing if that works, thanks for the tip!
You can also use Google Voice, and have it copy all the messages to your Gmail account.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2
So I started backing up and restoring and I was able to open all contacts' threads. The backup never fully restores all messages though and I have to keep hitting "restore" so that it'll restore them all up to the present day. Don't know why it's doing it this way.
Just now I've checked and that one contact won't open again. What I might do is try and restore all to the present, delete loads of messages I don't want, and backup this new message history.
I know this is most likely far too late but I was having the same problems and found this thread while trying to sort it and hope it will help anyone else in future who has the same problems. I tried backing up and restoring (Using both the default and sms back-up and restore) deleting the thread and restoring, eventually I solved it by installing handscent, deleting the messages sent/received back to when the problem started in that thread and a few before, then went in settings, apps, then all, messages cleared the cache, restarted and it is sorted!!
3dd1 said:
I know this is most likely far too late but I was having the same problems and found this thread while trying to sort it and hope it will help anyone else in future who has the same problems. I tried backing up and restoring (Using both the default and sms back-up and restore) deleting the thread and restoring, eventually I solved it by installing handscent, deleting the messages sent/received back to when the problem started in that thread and a few before, then went in settings, apps, then all, messages cleared the cache, restarted and it is sorted!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah it never resolved itself but I love the customisation of go sms pro so much that I don't mind anymore. Pity go sms pro crashes every so often and I think it slows the phone down.
I was going to start a new thread but see that this is the same problem I have.
I have a mt4gs (Doubleshot) and the problem described in this thread has happened twice. Both times i was receiving a text message and did something else with the phone at the same moment, and it seems to have jammed up the receipt of that text. The first time, i sent a text to the person at the same moment i received one. The second time, i locked the screen at the moment one arrived. Now that thread never loads, and loading other threads or contacts takes much longer than it should. In fact, i don't think contacts would ever load if i were willing to wait forever.
The first time I backed up the texts, reset the device, and restored, and everything worked fine, but that's a really time-consuming process and it seems like a ridiculous workaround for some broken buffer or queue in Android messaging.
It seems that there must be a direct fix for this. If it's easy enough to break messaging that it has happened to me twice, it must be a fairly common problem. But a search has turned up nothing but people saying there are too many messages or to use an alternative app for messaging. That's (1) incorrect and (2) again an ugly workaround for a problem with core functionality.
First off, I'd like to thank whoever takes the time to read and put any thought into this. Next, the reason I absolutely do not want to do anything that is going to erase/lose my SMS history; I'm an auto mechanic, and there is far too much various information on customers' vehicles, repair history and such...losing it all would be a huge setback. If I have to do something like a factory reset, I'm going to have to spend too many hours to even think about, manually going through 4 years of text messages to record everything. I tried a couple of options to backup said history, and nothing came up with even 100 messages to backup.
On to the problem... When SMS is received from person A, it shows up in a random, different person's(person B) thread. I then need to check the contact info to the left of the message to see who person A is, then back out, go to to person A's thread and respond there. If I respond in the thread that it's delivered to, person B gets the response. Any messages in the thread prior to this starting shows the proper contact, person B. Looking at message details, it shows the correct # in the 'From' section, but for 'To', it shows my number and the number for person B as if it was sent as a group text. This however is not the case...the message only comes to me.
I have tried deleting and reentering contacts, doing the same while the involved threads are archived, visaversa...and I haven't found any solutions. I'm very hesitant to even do a simple restart, as a couple of instances like mine that I've read, all SMS history vanished after rebooting. Any thoughts, ideas, or help of any kind would be amazing...and once again, thanks for taking the time.
Edit:The phone in question is a Moto G7 Optimo Maxx(XT1955DL) running stock Android 9, in case this info helps/makes a difference.
Basically what happens is I get old texts from previous conversations as if they were new. They will come in randomly but tend to follow the sequence of the conversation, so it basically replays the conversation but slowly over the day. Seems to affect group chats more. It makes following conversations very hard since they are full of old texts that are not relevant but they show up as new. Also annoying to keep getting notifications when I'm actually waiting for a text only to see that it's an old text that I got days ago.
Current phone is Google Pixel 4A with CalyxOS, but I've also tried Graphene OS and had the same issue. I've tried the stock app as well as QKSMS. I did not get the issue with Signal (using as SMS client) but they dropped support for SMS, so this started back again as soon as I switched off Signal. I even tried putting the sim card in my old phone (stock android) and it's still doing it! This part is strange to me because when this problem first surfaced, doing this did fix the problem.
How do I make this stop or begin troubleshooting this? Nobody in my contacts is having this issue so trying to convince them to switch to another messaging system is kind of futile, this is my problem. I am starting to wonder if I should just get an iphone like everyone else because it just works, but I really hate the closed nature of apple ecosystem.
I was thinking of looking into how to do app development and modify an existing open source client so that it ignores texts that have a send date older than 24h, but before I do that, is there already a text client for Android available in the F droid store or as an APK that would have such a feature?
So this is not just group chats like I thought. Starting to get old texts I got from single conversations now. Even pictures get resent. These show up as new texts, though they still have the original send date. This will at least make it easier to filter these out.
Anyone have an ideas how to make this stop? Driving me insane. I really don't want to have to write my own app.
Anyone? This problem is driving me insane. It started happening with a vengeonce again. I am being bombarded by old texts that I already got days ago. It's just playing out the entire conversation over the course of a few days. Have to put the phone in airplane mode to make it stop otherwise the phone is just lit up non stop with old texts coming in.
At very least is there some kind of logging of sorts I can enable that would help me better troubleshoot this?
Inreally dont know but i Remember this happened to me sometime ,maybe Just try a factory reset or change rom , i dont know
I tried several roms, resets etc. While it was happening I even put the sim card in another phone and it started doing it on that phone too. It's also not a carrier issue since I'm the only person having this issue. I've also tried all sorts of text apps. The only one it didn't do it with was Signal but they dropped SMS support, which really sucks.