How do I save all my txts somewhere before I wipe my phone?

December 29, 2015 8:08 AM

So after 3.5 years, I finally broke down and got a new cell phone. Verizon is giving me a $200 credit to return my old phone. Normally I would just keep it but… that’s a lot of money. My question is, how do I save all my txts somewhere like dropbox? I really, really don’t want to lose over three years of txts, particularly ones from a friend who recently passed away.

I googled it and there’s tons of different shady sounding apps or procedures that I’m afraid to try. I can’t risk losing these txts. Does anyone have a tried and true method or app to copy everything to a file or dropbox or whatever? I don’t want to just store them on my computer because it’s getting replaced soon. My old phone is a Droid Razr Maxx.

I have to send my old phone back in the next few days! Help!

posted by silverstatue to Technology (14 answers total)

I got an iphone a few months ago, but before that I used SMS Backup + all the time, which pushed all of my texts to a separate folder in my gmail account. (It didn't interfere with email at all - you can have them archived instantly so they don't show up in your regular inbox, just in a folder tucked away but still searchable.) When I switched to new Android phones, which I did a few times over the years, I was always able to sync the new phone and put all of the old texts on it pretty seamlessly. (It's actually one of the big things I miss about Android phones, that's how well it worked.)
posted by needs more cowbell at 8:14 AM on December 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I've had success with SMS Backup & Restore
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 8:15 AM on December 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Another vote for SMS Backup+. I've used it through 3 phone changes over the last 5 years and it works great - copies everything, whether one-time or ongoing (how I use it now) to a gmail folder.
posted by dust.wind.dude at 8:21 AM on December 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I used SMS Backup +, but Verizon can also do this for you if they transfer your old phone info to your new phone, using their backup app. (It just transfers them phone to phone, not to a backup file, but its another option.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:24 AM on December 29, 2015

SMS Backup + gets my vote as well.
posted by deezil at 8:34 AM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Like Eyebrows says, they'll pretty much do this for you at Verizon when you get your new phone. I just replaced a 4 year old phone a month ago, and they transferred all my data from my old phone to the new one when they set it up. I think they used a Verizon cloud app to do it, which had to be installed on my old phone first, but it will almost certainly come pre-installed on your new one. How long the transfer takes depends on how much stuff you have.
posted by LionIndex at 8:47 AM on December 29, 2015

Ditto SMS Backup +. It can copy them onto your new phone, too, not just back them up in Gmail.
posted by limeonaire at 8:56 AM on December 29, 2015

I've used the Email My Texts App on my Android for a while and am happy with it. It sends the texts as an email, that I can either save as that or copy and paste into a word document for future reference.
posted by NoraCharles at 9:12 AM on December 29, 2015

I've used SMS Backup as well.

Beware of the Verizon credit - a friend of mine did this, and then a couple of bills later, had an extra charge on their bill that couldn't be explained. We think Verizon decided the old phone wasn't worth as much as they had given them for it.
posted by needlegrrl at 9:16 AM on December 29, 2015

I use Decipher Text Message and highly recommend it. Especially since some of these messages hold significant sentimental value to you, I wouldn't rely simply on Verizon transferring your data from one phone to another. People can easily screw this up by accident.
posted by katemcd at 2:34 PM on December 29, 2015

Love SMS Backup + which has served me through multiple phones/formatting phones/changing carriers. I just leave it running all the time, it backs up texts daily or so.
posted by getawaysticks at 4:05 PM on December 29, 2015

Response by poster: oh man, I did SMS Backup + but it totally didnt work out as i expected. I had something like 10,000 txt messages and it basically sent me 10,000 emails, each one as one separate message. That was terrible. I though it would send like an email per conversation.

Is that what it's supposed to look like? This is not cool!
posted by silverstatue at 4:23 PM on December 29, 2015

Mine sent one email per text--there's not really a concept of "conversation" with texts, and also it's intended primarily to back up texts as they come in, so it has to send one per text message. I haven't found that to be a problem at all, though, because the conversations are threaded in gmail, the emails themselves don't take up a lot of storage space (they're just tiny text files) and gmail has so much storage capacity. And at least when I've done it, they're archived from the start and never show up in my inbox so it's totally non-intrusive. I'm not sure if that was a setting I had to select within the app or within gmail.

So I don't see the text message emails within gmail at all unless I go to the "SMS" label/folder, in which case I see something that looks like this (cropped to avoid showing private details.)
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:15 PM on December 29, 2015

I don't know the best way to save texts, but is Verizon promising you $200 for *your* phone or for *any* phone when you trade it in? If the latter, consider buying a cheap Verizon phone off craigslist and handing that over instead. I did this with T-Mobile, and it worked out really well for me.
posted by aaanastasia at 12:52 AM on December 30, 2015