iPhone How to Export/Save SMS Messages (apps)-- No Hacks?

i did a thorough google search, and it looks like that mobilesync app is your best bet. you could, however, transcribe to ms word all your 1,000 texts.

do you have a mac? Theres as perl script you can run to catalog your SMSes

possible solutions

So long as you have a mac, try google Syphone. I've read it works, but have a pc, so have not tried it. on a pc, a solution is supposedly found at:

http://www.modmyifone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4618

but I am having trouble finding my sms.db file

devilot said:

So, what the title says.

I'm searching for a way to store/ save/ backup SMS messages seeing as the lovely iPhone w/ its massive 8GB of storage, is incapable of allocating more memory for texts.

A friend found MobileSync which pretty much does what I'm looking for. But there's no real full version. I'd pay for one, but alas, it's only in a "preview" version (as the developer calls it).

I also am NOT interested in anything that requires any sort of fiddling w/ the phone (as in hacks or whatnot).

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

You can use The Missing Sync for iPhone, but you'll have to pony up a nice $39.95 or something like that.

devilot said:

Thanks, but as you'll kindly note, this was posted in early October. Just about 3 months ago. I have since started using... The link in case anyone else is trying to find it is here.

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I'm sorry, I didn't even notice, just saw it bolded in the recent threads section lol.

devilot said:

So, what the title says.

I'm searching for a way to store/ save/ backup SMS messages seeing as the lovely iPhone w/ its massive 8GB of storage, is incapable of allocating more memory for texts.

A friend found MobileSync which pretty much does what I'm looking for. But there's no real full version. I'd pay for one, but alas, it's only in a "preview" version (as the developer calls it).

I also am NOT interested in anything that requires any sort of fiddling w/ the phone (as in hacks or whatnot).

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

Wow cool app man, just what i've been looking for!

Copy/Paste into text program on phone.....
Forward to email...

Oh wait, for a second there I was thinking you were talking about a Treo. Um, looks like you may have to wait for 16.7.9 firmware to do what every other smart phone can do today!

You can use this method
http://www.geekology.co.za/blog/2009/05/exporting-iphone-sms-message-database-to-csv-file/

PhoneView for Mac.

If you don't want to pay for any external tool and don't want to use unsafe hosted solutions, try this:

1. download the free SQLite Database Browser from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/
2. locate your SMS database from the iphone backup (works only if the backup is not encrypted). You can find the backups of your iOS devices is at the ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ folder. Each subfolder corresponds to an iOS device backup. The file you need has this (rather strange) name:
3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28
3. Simply open the file in the SQLLite Database Browser
4. Clik "Browse Data" and select the "message" table. There you find all your messages.

If you want to export the data, select File/Export/Export as CSV. You can open your CSV file in Excel.

But what if you wanted to restore them back to the iPhone after a fresh restore not from backup?