How can I archive my phone's text messages for future reference, without paying a lot in money or effort?

November 26, 2007 10:57 AM

How can I make an archive of my SMS messages? In this era of network-accessible, searchable, archived, free, multi-gigabyte email storage, I'm a little miffed that my SMS storage is limited to arbitrary limit of 50 message on my phone. Lots of important things come in via SMS, and I hate how they just disappear. I get Twitters from friends, nice notes from my girlfriend, voice mail transcriptions from CallWave, business information via GOOG-411's text service... and so on. I'd like for the solution to cost as little as possible. I don't have an unlimited txt plan (I get a few hundred per month) so simply forwarding every SMS I receive and CCing every SMS I send to an email address isn't a very appealing solution as it really raises my SMS costs and takes effort.

I'm just putting this out there, because I don't think I'll be able to implement this... if you wanna make a splash doing this for Android or something... have at it!

posted by k7lim to technology (9 comments total)

Get people to SMS to a grandcentral number and set up forwarding to your local phone and cc whatever email you want.
posted by iamabot at 11:07 AM on November 26, 2007

BitPim allows you to download all the data from your phone and archive it. (if you have a compatible phone) and it's free.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:26 AM on November 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

It'd help if you mention what phone you have and what operating system you're using. I'm aware of a few applications to pull messages off my phone that I can use to archive them on my PC. Nokia's Lifeblog does this, but their desktop software also allows SMS copying one-by-one.
posted by mikeh at 11:26 AM on November 26, 2007

I believe BluePhone Elite does this for OS X, as long as you have bluetooth...
posted by sharkfu at 12:16 PM on November 26, 2007

I use Jeyo Mobile Extender.
posted by healthytext at 1:14 PM on November 26, 2007

I have a windows desktop, a macbook pro and i'm on an unlocked n95... i'll look into lifeblog... and nokia's desktop softwares... thanks mikeh! i take it these software back things up to a desktop. i'd love it if i were able to have a searchable archive on my phone itself... i have a 4 gig card in this thing for crying out loud.
posted by k7lim at 5:18 PM on November 26, 2007

zyb.com is an online mobile sync tool and they also offer sms backups. Don't know how it works. Registration is free, but I don't know if the SMS backup is or not.
posted by dantodd at 5:33 PM on November 26, 2007

just fwd the text message to your own regular email account (ie. yahoo.. gmail) through your phone. at least that's what i do.
posted by lunachic at 6:10 PM on November 26, 2007

you can use GSync to sync your messages to a gmail account
and you shouldn't have a 50 sms limit on a nokia n95. go to messaging/options/settings/other and make sure you are using the phone memory
posted by tsnot at 2:43 PM on November 27, 2007