What's the best way to save old text messages?
December 2, 2020 2:34 PM   Subscribe

Assuming you might need them for legal proof in the future

My sister has a crazy ex who stalked her for a while. She's free and safe now and has been for several months, but she has a new phone and new phone number that is not linked to her old one. (for obvious reasons.) The old phone is a piece of junk that barely charges at all. It looks like it's on it's last legs and going to die. We took it to a place to fix it and was told that there was no way as even the repair person couldn't figure out how to charge it. Even with a new battery it does not charge.

We'd like to get all the ex's old messages off the phone to keep them just in case it's necessary in the future. The text messages are not saved on the sd card though and they seem to only come up on the phone itself. Is there a legit way to transfer all the text messages to a laptop or something? Or is the only way to photograph frame by frame each message with a separate camera?
posted by fantasticness to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Screenshot
posted by parmanparman at 2:50 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


If this is an Android phone, there are definitely apps you can get to backup your text messages and open them on a new phone. There's no reason you couldn't also save the backup file to the cloud or computer.
posted by irisclara at 3:09 PM on December 2, 2020


Screenshots should be sufficient. IANAL, I've seen screenshots presented as exhibits in legal filings plenty of times. If the phone is so janky that you can't work with screenshots, you could just photograph the text messages themselves. Hopefully there aren't too many of them.
posted by un petit cadeau at 3:20 PM on December 2, 2020


Use share to email each text to an account? This is still message by message though. But at least you would have them as text files.
How to do this on my android phone: press and hold the message you want to email - select share - select email and enter the email address.
posted by carter at 4:05 PM on December 2, 2020


Reading metabaroque's comment, yes they are text files, but you would have the email with a header as proof of where they came from.
posted by carter at 4:06 PM on December 2, 2020


Just a side note, in case it's of any interest—in addition to backup apps, there's some command in the official Android SDK tools that will back up everything like that, which I'd imagine most apps are just a wrapper for, though I can't remember what it is off the top of my head.
posted by XMLicious at 4:52 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Any advice you get here may not apply wherever your sister lives. I am not a lawyer. I am close with lawyers who have dealt with text messages as evidence in US federal courts, and the following advice comes from their experiences.

Screenshots are a good method of capturing text messages, mainly because they're quick and easy to do. And since it sounds like your sister has an Android, she should have the option of saving them to the SD card, which is extractible even if the phone dies. Take shots of the entire conversation, in chronological order. Be sure the date/time the messages were sent and the contact info of the sender are visible in the screenshots.

Backup apps such as the one irisclara linked to are also frequently used for this, but they're a little more difficult for people who might not be tech savvy. I would suggest only going this route as a safety option after doing the screenshots, or if there are so many messages that it's not feasible to screencap them all. If this phone is really on its last legs, definitely do the screenshots first before fiddling around with some other method.

Your sister should also note that, for various reasons, there's no guarantee these messages would automatically be admissible in court.
posted by theory at 6:34 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


I strongly suspect that if any of the attorneys I work for received a text file of text messages from their client, they would go to their client and ask them for screenshots if at all possible. If that was all they had, then so be it, but I've aided litigation attorneys as my lifelong career and screenshots somehow seem to the most common way these are shown.

Screenshots of texts would never pass any financial audit, so I'd also suggest emailing them to store them. Funny how these diametrically oppose one another!
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:01 AM on December 3, 2020


The problem with screenshots is that you lose the metadata. A screenshot of a text conversation has no proof of anything. Anyone can shop it. If there's any chance of these things being challenged in court it will be necessary to have the metadata to prove who sent what, when. The backup app I linked above includes metadata.

INAL but if I were I would challenge the hell out of screenshots.
posted by irisclara at 4:57 PM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am *absolutely* not a lawyer -- this is not legal advice -- but I work for a legal services technology company / eDiscovery vendor that does a lot of mobile device forensics for lawsuits, etc. If you're willing to pay for the service, I'd really recommend contacting a company like this, who can collect from the device itself and preserve the relevant messages / documents in a legally-defensible format (preserving and logging all the metadata, producing a full report/spreadsheet of it all).

You can DM me if you have questions about this or want some potential service companies to contact. But suffice it to say, when it comes to litigation, just screenshots themselves -- though many attorneys and legal professionals still think they're ok -- are not defensible in court.
posted by cluebucket at 5:58 PM on December 5, 2020 [2 favorites]


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