My mom decided to be a dumbass and keep a bunch of photos stored permanently in the text messaging app. Whenever someone sent her something, she wouldn't actually save it, just leave it in the messaging history and dig through the relevant messages whenever she wants to use the photo again. Now, she has a new phone, and she wants all of the pictures that are currently in the text message app on her old phone to be stored in a folder on her new phone, or at the very least to be on her new phone in some form. Ideally, what I want is to get a tarball of all of the messaging app's data that I can then cp *.jpg all of the images out of, and then I can email her the images. I am unwilling to try to root the phone because there are no backups of it, so I don't want to risk breaking anything.
The first thing I tried were the SMS transfer apps from the play store, such as this and this. In theory, these would be the easiest to use solution, and while they wouldn't be out of the messaging app, at least they would be on the new phone. I tried about 10 of them, multiple times each. Every single one would claim to have succeeded in transferring over the messages, but absolutely nothing ever appeared on the new phone.
The next thing I decided to try was LG Switch, since both phones were made by LG. Unfortunately, that didn't work out either. It wanted to wipe the new phone and basically set it up to be an exact copy of the old one. My mom has already started to use the new phone, so nuking the entire phone and copying everything over is not acceptable. Additionally, the radios on the old phone only work intermittently (one of the reasons that the phone was replaced), so I don't want to do anything that will take more than a minute or two over wireless.
Next, I tried Helium. The desktop app opens fine, but the app on the phone doesn't work. Sometimes, I get the application homescreen with a popup claiming that it is waiting for the desktop application and a cancel button that doesn't work. Sometimes, I get a solid white screen. In either case, the desktop app doesn't see it, the phone slows down and gets hot, and eventually I get a "Helium is not responding" popup. This has persisted across multiple attempts to wipe Helium's data and reinstall it.
The final thing I tried was LG Backup, which was buried in the settings menu. The old phone created a backup just fine, but the backup is in a proprietary format that I can't open on my laptop, and LG does not make it clear whether restoring on the new phone will keep the data that's already there or not. Additionally, this will still have the images trapped in a messaging app, except on the new phone instead of the old one.
I'm out of ideas. Anything else I can try? Any way I can fix the issues with something I already tried? Any way I can do this manually with ADB? In case it matters, the old phone is an LG G2 from T-Mobile (Model LG-D801) on Android 5.0.2, and the new phone is an LG K40.
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After various issues (rebooting constantly, power button, touchscreen) i have decided to send it back for repair as i an no longer tolerate it. I need to know how to back my data up quickly and easily. Is there a way without buying an app. Totally standard sim free sensation. The issues all occured before 2.3.4 so i know its not that being he problem. Thanks in advance.
"my backup" is a free app in the market that will backup all your contacts, photos, text messages, settings etc. It won't be able to back up all your apps unless you are rooted but no other program will be able to either. Just make sure you save the file to your computer from your SD card. You also have the option to save your stuff to a cloud server on the internet and password protect it so its completely up to you.
So i originally had my phone rooted, but after a couple months of having my phone bother me about updating, i decided to do it. Needless to say, I lost root. I was planning on rooting it again, but my phone got knocked out of my hand and fell, cracking the screen and making it useless (no more touch and screen won't power on). So now i'm trying to pull my contacts and my text messages from the phone, but since it's not rooted, I can't figure out a way to do it. Also, i tried going through adb, but it keeps saying "device not found", even though my phone still powers up and works (I can tell because I keep getting text messages and my phone rings. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get my information off the phone and on my pc? I've also tried using 'MyPhoneExplorer', but it can't find my phone either.
Your contacts will be backed up to your Google Account, but not your texts unfortunately
Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda app-developers app
I've used this app for years:
SMS Backup and Restore
It doesn't back up MMS though (picture messages). You can manually save any pics sent to you via text to your SD card using every text app I've seen, including the stock ones. That said, I suspect by now there are apps that will back up MMS.
Looks like the stock Messaging app can save text messages as well....
My phone hasn't aged the best, and I text my girlfriend every day. My phone has had the option to keep messages limited to 1000 and then it'll delete the oldest texts to keep the number down, but I had it disabled for some reason. About a year ago, I tried to delete all of our texts. It was about two years' worth. And my phone would just sit, saying "deleting" for hours. It would either sit there forever, or my phone would stop responding and restart and the process would stop when it did, making the whole effort useless. A year later, it hasn't gotten any better. Even when I activate the setting to automatically delete old texts, it won't. Is there any way to access these texts by hooking it up to a computer maybe? I'm thinking if I can delete the texts on a device that isn't my phone, the process would go a lot smoother. Any ideas/help would be appreciated!
dkibble said:
My phone hasn't aged the best, and I text my girlfriend every day. My phone has had the option to keep messages limited to 1000 and then it'll delete the oldest texts to keep the number down, but I had it disabled for some reason. About a year ago, I tried to delete all of our texts. It was about two years' worth. And my phone would just sit, saying "deleting" for hours. It would either sit there forever, or my phone would stop responding and restart and the process would stop when it did, making the whole effort useless. A year later, it hasn't gotten any better. Even when I activate the setting to automatically delete old texts, it won't. Is there any way to access these texts by hooking it up to a computer maybe? I'm thinking if I can delete the texts on a device that isn't my phone, the process would go a lot smoother. Any ideas/help would be appreciated!
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Click to collapse
The mms and sms are held in a data base file on your phone and can only be accessed with an app which has root permission. The file path to this folder easily searchable online but there are several mmssms.db files in this folder and the right one has to be deleted, in your case it will be the biggest. db file listed.
You cannot delete individual texts with this method you just delete everything in your mms and sms inbox if you get rid of this file. Android system will then auto generate a new empty one.
You may find it much easier to back up everything you want to keep on the phone then factory reset. Now, it is very easy to do this with Samsung smart switch or simply copy folders from your phone to pc then back again after reset
dkibble said:
My phone hasn't aged the best, and I text my girlfriend every day. My phone has had the option to keep messages limited to 1000 and then it'll delete the oldest texts to keep the number down, but I had it disabled for some reason. About a year ago, I tried to delete all of our texts. It was about two years' worth. And my phone would just sit, saying "deleting" for hours. It would either sit there forever, or my phone would stop responding and restart and the process would stop when it did, making the whole effort useless. A year later, it hasn't gotten any better. Even when I activate the setting to automatically delete old texts, it won't. Is there any way to access these texts by hooking it up to a computer maybe? I'm thinking if I can delete the texts on a device that isn't my phone, the process would go a lot smoother. Any ideas/help would be appreciated!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you tried going into the app manager in settings and just delete the data from your messaging app?
My next door neighbor is a sweet old lady who we occasionally invite over for dinner and take care of stuff for her (lawn mowing/weeding/spraying, etc....), and she has this LG Stylo 4 phone and her carrier is metro by t-mobile. Now I forgot exactly when this happened, but she had all of her contacts 86'd out of nowhere, and she claims that maybe her phone got hacked or something, I don't know
I fiddled enough with my phone and thought "maybe I can recover her contacts for her" since im the tech support for all modern hardware problems in my family (phone problems, computer problems and so on), but i'm hitting a roadblock on how I can get her contacts back without rooting her phone. I tried seeing if she had her contacts auto-backing up to whatever google service she was auto-set with, but none of her contacts were set to backup at all, and last time we ran into this problem was with my father, and by his words, it took about 6 months for his vanished contacts to magically re-appear somehow without his input
so, is there any non-root method available for me to get her contacts back, or will she have to re-add them one by one by memory?
so....I guess ill take the lack of any replies as there is no non-root method of restoring her contacts bar sending her phone to its respective manufacturer/dealer
kinda disappointed ngl
There's not much you can do unless she has a Google account linked to the phone or backed up her contacts with an app. As far as her contacts disappearing, it could be something as simple as settings, contacts settings, and view.. maybe she messed with the settings and accidentally clicked off of her phone for what contacts to view in settings. It has to be something simple because unless somebody's just trying to be an ass I don't see somebody hacking a little old lady's phone just to delete her contacts.
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.