How To: Backup your SMS into Gmail, backup into PDF or transfer between your smartphones! Easy guide!

How To: Backup your SMS into Gmail, backup into PDF or transfer between your smartphones! Easy guide!

   08:00       Mateusz Burzyński

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Today's guide will be a handy one - how to backup our SMS and texts into our smartphone's internal memory, into Gmail and also how to transfer our SMS texts backups between or smartphones! Let's do it!

There was an recent update in Facebook Messenger app giving the user ability to send texts. Default Android app for sending SMS isn't the best invention in the world - it gets really laggy after several thousands of messages. Unless you will enable the function which automatically deletes SMS every 200 or so messages, it will get really laggy, no matter how good your smartphone is.

I have been through quite a lot of smartphones and I noticed that no matter how strong the CPU or how much RAM does your phone have, it will eventually get laggy.

There will be a time, when using the SMS app will be a serious chore and you will have to delete the texts anyway. Well most of people don't have seriously sensitive or valuable information there, but sometimes texts can be really handy - for example as an evidence in court proceedings.

Keep in mind that you absolutely should keep several backups of your messages. About 10.000 messages can be as space consuming (that is sarcasm) as maybe 4-5 megabytes of data so even the cheapest microSD card can hold about eternity of our messages. You never know when it would come in handy.

So let's begin our quick guide, which is based on three apps this time, each with different functions.

SMS Backup & Restore

Let's begin with the quickest and - in my opinion - most useful one. This app can do backups, transfer SMS between devices (it's not an built-in feature but it is so easy to use that we can count it as a feature).

You can find the app in the Google Play store. If you want just simple backup of your text - install it on the phone, if you need to transfer SMS between devices - just install on both phones.

This is the main menu of app as seen on screenshot.

Simply push Backup to use it.

The app will then show us a couple of warning, just press OK on each one. The app just warns us that once you deinstall it from your phone, your backups will be gone, but you can avoid that by just copying them to some place else - any will do. The app will save backups in default folder: Android/data/com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore/files. It will save interally if you don't have microSD card or on card if you have it.

Here's the backup settings. As you can see we can fiddle around with our backup - we can limit it to calls only, sms only and MMS are also supported. You can also limit backup to certain conversations - that is only messages from and to certain people.

Now, let's go to the Backup locations section:

Local Backup only means exactly what it reads - it makes a backup in .XML format only on your phone, Local backup and upload will make the .XML copy in memory as above and also auto-upload it to server of your choosing.

If you press OK, the app will start making backup - it's amazingly fast - 10.000 messages went in like a couple of seconds!

After that, we can also view our SMS by clicking View in main menu. Here's what this app does best - keeping texts structure intact - we can quickly read our text presented in the same way as we had it on our phone!

Well now you probably know how to transfer backup between phones - you just transfer the file to phone with the method of your choosing - Bluetooth or other, or better yet, just upload and then download it from server of your choosing. You just fire up app in your second phone and just choose Restore backup and you're good to go.

SMS Backup+

Another app, but this one is solely for making Gmail backups. It will create an label on our Gmail account with SMS in it. Let's go!

First we must check the Connect checkbox and choose our Gmail account. Then we can fiddle around with auto backups and auto backup settings. 

When we are done, just choose Backup. The app is developed just fine, but is really and I mean really slow. It shouldn't be used with more than 1.000 SMS backup, it can crash quite frequently. It is like 5 messages per second rate, so really slow. Maybe it is useful to some people. Keep in mind that you can access Gmail from literally anywhere - and your texts as well.

Also - you can easily print that texts.

SMS to PDF Converter
The last app doesn't need lenghty description - it just backups our texts into good looking PDF which we can easily print. Keep in mind that you can't restore backup made in PDF. But it is more useful for printing than - let's say - XML and Gmail messages are.

How about printing a book about that stupid shit jokes you made with your friend on texts.