My current phone is becoming somewhat unreliable — battery issues — so I got a newer model. Most of the material on the old phone will transfer easily, but SMS messages present a problem since the transfer app can only accommodate 3500 and I have many more than that. I tried a different app (SMS Backup & Restore); after about four hours it told me that the messages had been migrated, but they don’t show up in Messenger. Does anyone have a suggestion regarding alternate approaches? I suppose I could offload the existing messages to a PC and start fresh, but for a number of reasons I’d prefer to keep them available on the phone.
While this is not an urgent issue since I’m still able to use the old phone, I would like to get it resolved in the not-too-distant future. As always, thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.
I was coming in to say to try SMS Backup & Restore (the one by SyncTech, right?), but I guess if you’ve already tried it and it doesn’t work, then I’m not sure what to try next. I have about 19,000 messages, and it takes about 5-10 minutes to do a backup, and maybe twice that to do a restore. I think if it took 4 hours you either have hundreds of thousands of messages, or something is going wrong. Maybe try storing to a different location. For example to your google drive instead of locally, or the other way around, or to a different cloud service. It is necessary to make SMS Backup and Restore your texting app while it is doing the restore. It should prompt for you to do that. If you don’t, it won’t work.
It may be necessary to force stop, or just reboot the phone after doing the restore to get your regular messaging app to process all of the messages.
The builtin Google backup stuff will also backup your SMS messages, but I’m not sure if it does all of them, and in the past it has been tricky for me to convince Google to restore things.
To preserve message threads. Some people like to refer back to older messages…depends on how you use text messages. Other people, I imagine, treat them like ephemera…
It’s indeed odd that it takes so long to run, but have you tried deleting data from the messaging app after the restore? I had the same thing and then I read the tip that flashes on the screen after a restore.
When looking up Messenger, I found some Whatsapp-like thing or Facebook Messenger that use a whole different database, I think.
I could see a few reasons. Me? I have a side hustle breeding & selling something locally, and 99% of my sales are set up via messenger. It’s handy to be able to, say, send a message to all my previous customers that I’m having a sale.
It’s also nice when someone pops up that I haven’t dealt with in a while … the conversation simply picks back up, without anyone having to re-introduce themselves or whatever.
Thanks(!) for the responses and suggestions. I did try another app (Super Backup and Restore), and while it took prit’ near forever to restore, the messages did show up eventually. Unfortunately, there were no images — and one daughter has a tendency to send messages that consist of nothing but an image — so that’s a bit of a disappointment. Of course, there may be no way around the issue, since technically messages containing images are MMS, not SMS.
And his buzzer goes …, could you (or anyone) elaborate on the bolded part a bit? I did see a suggestion like it in a post about SMS Backup & Restore, but there was no indication about how to go about it and I couldn’t suss it on my own (Android is definitely not my OS of record).
As to why I want to retain as many as possible, allyn pretty much nailed it: to retain context. Also, <soppy>there are times when I just want to revisit conversations with my daughters</soppy>.
From the launcher/homescreen you can hold the icon of the app, it should either pop up a menu or display some icons on the top of the screen. You’re looking for a circled i. When you get the popup, select the i; when you have the icons on the top, drag the app icon to the i.
The other way is through settings - app, look for or scroll to your app.
In here should be a section called “Storage and cache” or the like. In there you should have wipe or erase storage. After clearing this, you can open the app again and it should read in the restored messages. At least that worked on my end.
The OP was specifically about Android Messenger (I prefer to have as little to do with Facebook as possible, mostly using it to check the menu at the local soup kitchen).
As to the topic at hand, I’m now satisfied that I have as many back messages as I’m ever going to get. So I’m going to switch the SIM card and retire the old phone (but not get rid of it yet: at some point I’ll probably export its message store to Windows).
So thanks again to everyone for your help. Go ahead and continue the discussion if you find it interesting, but from my POV the question has been answered.