Backing up your text messages from your android phone to your gmail account is so simple there’s no reason not to back them up and make them searchable in the process. read on to see how you can turn your gmail account into an sms vault.
what you will need
It’s easy to lose your text messages. everything from switching phones to fiddling with your fingers can leave your messages in front of the digital reaper: I managed to accidentally delete a massive sms thread last night when in reality I only intended to delete a single message that it refused to send.
Backing up your sms messages to your gmail account is very simple, however there is no good reason not to. For this tutorial you will need three things:
- your android phone
- a gmail account
- a free copy of sms backup+ from google play store
do you have all that? Let’s get started!
step one: configure your gmail account for imap access
SMS Backup+ requires IMAP access to your Gmail account to function. Let’s take a moment and hop over to the Gmail account we’re planning on using with the application and check the status.
log in to your gmail account and navigate to settings > forwarding and pop/imap. check “enable imap”. scroll down and click “save changes”.
Go to Google’s security page and set up two-factor authentication, if you’re not already using it.
click “app passwords” and provide your login information.
click the dropdown box called “select apps” and set it to “other (custom name)”.
set the name to something descriptive, like sms backup+, and click “generate”.
You will be provided with a password. keep the window open or temporarily store this password in a safe place. you’ll need it in just a minute.
step two: install and configure sms backup+
with the imap functions of our gmail account activated, it’s time to install sms backup+. go to the google play store and download the app. After installing the app, it’s time to start setting up. start the application.
The first step is to set up the connection to your gmail account. tap “advanced settings”.
then tap “custom imap server”.
There is a lot to enter here. tap “authentication” and change it from “xoauth2 (gmail)” to “plain text”.
tap “server address”, set the imap server address to “imap.gmail.com:933” and click “ok”.
then check the rest of the options: enter your email, the password you just generated, and make sure “security” is set to tls. you don’t have to check “trust all certificates”, so leave it unchecked.
go back to the main menu and click “backup”. we didn’t come all this way not to back things up!
The backup process will start, and depending on how many messages you have, it will take anywhere from a minute to a half hour (or more!) to complete. it chugs at a few messages per second.
You don’t even have to wait until the process is complete to access the gmail account and check the progress. log in to your gmail account from a web browser. you will see a new label in the sidebar: “sms”. click it.
success! sms backup+ automatically backs up your sms and mms messages. not only are all our text messages there, but the pictures we’ve sent back and forth are backed up in gmail along with the messages. Now that we have everything working, let’s look at some advanced options.
step three (optional): turn on automatic backups
If you do nothing else before leaving this tutorial, you should enable the automatic backup feature. leave things in the hands of manual backup in a safe way to forget. From the main screen, touch “auto backup” to turn it on, and then touch “auto backup settings” to set the frequency. the default configuration is a bit aggressive. you may want, like we did, to decrease the frequency of backups.
You can even set it to only backup over Wi-Fi. that way if you’re backing up a lot of mms, you won’t burn up your mobile data.
After setting up automatic backup, go back to the main screen and go to the advanced settings. there, you can change settings for backup, restore, and notifications. under “backup” there are a few useful settings you might want to toggle, including turning off mms backup (again, to save on data consumption) and creating a whitelist of contacts you want to back up (in instead of the default where each individual message is backed up).
There’s not much to see in the restore settings, but you can take advantage of a handy gmail-focused trick. When SMS Backup+ stores your messages in Gmail, it creates a thread for each contact. You can tell SMS Backup+ to only restore contacts with starred threads, allowing you to quickly select which conversations are important enough to restore via the star system in Gmail.
There you have it! All your text messages (including multimedia attachments) are backed up to Gmail, where you can easily find them and restore them to your phone if needed.