IPhone – Restore iPhone SMS history from Mac Messages without iPhone backup

backupicloudiphonemessagessms

I recently reimaged my iPhone, however I forgot to check my SMS history before deleting my original backup. I assumed, incorrectly, that it would sync via iCloud, or by the SMS Forwarding feature that brings these messages into Mac OS X Messages. So, I have no sms.db, but I do have chat.db and the supporting Attachments. Extensive searching turns up nothing.

How hard is it to translate a chat.db file into an sms.db file suitable for restoring from an iPhone backup? Major surgery? Minor hacking? Rename the file?

Best Answer

This will surely frustrate later arrivals who only have chat.db available, but I later realized I have other iOS devices with up-to-date Messages. I extracted sms.db and Attachments from those backups (using iPhone Backup Extractor), merged them into my latest iPhone backup (using iBackupBot), and restored the backup. I'd suggest turning on airplane mode to avoid receiving texts in the backup/restore interim.

This tutorial provides details on where these files go.

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IPhone – How to export SMS text messages from the iPhone

Get /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db
It is now exported.

What format do you want the export to be? The existing format is sqlite, so you can convert it to ASCII like so: sqlite3 sms.db .dump > sms.db.txt

For step one, you can jailbreak and then scp, or you can just search your backup folder for the file, no jailbreak required.

If your phone is not jailbroken, look on OS X in:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/<long_hex_string>/

And, in my case, and according to various web sources, although not in all cases, is named:

3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28

To answer your other questions: Any OS, Free, Successful.

IPhone backup restore SMS

If you used the iTunes backup restore process or the iCloud backup restore process, then your messages should have been transferred automatically back to your phone as these are included with the iTunes/iCloud backup.

If for some reason this did not happen, you might want to try restoring again or restoring from a different backup (if available).

Reference: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4946

Note the mention of Messages in the list of data that is backed up.

iTunes will back up the following information 
    - Messages (iMessage and carrier SMS or MMS pictures and videos).

Best Answer

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IPhone backup restore SMS

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