I recently got a new Android phone secondhand, and after resetting it I wanted to move the text message archive over from my old phone. It turns out that you can do this easily if you have root access. Well, technically you can do anything easily if you have root access, but the trick is knowing how. I hope that by putting this out on the internet, other people will be able to know how too.
I had root access on both phones, as they were flashed with CyanogenMod. The new phone is a Nexus 4, and the old phone is an HTC G1 (Android 2.2 is the highest that could run on it.)
On both (and as far as I know, all) versions of Android, all the text messages are stored in this file, which you need root access to read:
/data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db
Getting the file off the G1 was easy; I entered the Terminal Emulator app (I think it’s installed automatically when you flash CyanogenMod) and copied the file to the SD card:
su cp /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db /sdcard/
(su requests superuser permissions, which you have to grant.) Then I connected the G1 to my computer with its USB cable and transferred the file off of it.
Getting the file onto the Nexus 4 was harder. What I did not know is that the Nexus 4 can’t mount its SD card as USB Mass Storage (see the explanation), so I ended up using my Apple laptop to do the transfer, and had to download a program called Android File Transfer. Still, I got it onto the phone’s SD card.
Since the newer version of Cyanogenmod comes with a file manager app, I decided to use that to put the file into the correct place, instead of Terminal Emulator (typing shell commands on a phone is no joke.) The file manager is set to “Safe mode” by default which means it won’t request root access. I changed it to “Prompt User mode” in the settings, then navigated to the above databases/ folder and made a backup copy of the old (empty? 100 KB? It’s a sqlite DB so maybe there are still deleted records in there, but I don’t care to check) database. Then I copied the G1’s mmssms.db file over top of it. Unlike on the G1, there was also a mmssms.db-journal file there, which I hoped wouldn’t mess with things…
I couldn’t see my text messages after going into the messaging app, but after rebooting the phone, they were there.
The Mad Scientist Review 