iPhone Advice on upgrading a JB iPhone 5 from iOS6>8 and keeping SMS history

[Nanook]

My two main concerns are retaining my SMS history and not carrying over too much bloat from old jailbreaks. What I'd love to do is just update (restore) to iOS8 and restore from a current JBed iOS 6.1.3 backup and have everything work fine, but after doing that from iOS5>6, I am afraid there will be some wonkiness not to mention wasted space.

So my planned course of action is: back up, restore to 8.1 (or 8.1.1 if a Mac method comes along shortly), follow the instructions here and use iBackupBot to extract my SMS history and merge that with a clean iOS8 back up, jailbreak and basically install everything, apps and Cydia tweaks, from scratch.

I am totally open to suggestions of better ways to do what I want to do. And thanks in advance!

 

[dcharleyultra]

I believe an iCloud restore, vs an iTunes restore, won't bring the wonkiness caused by prior jailbreaks.

 

[darricksailo]

My two main concerns are retaining my SMS history and not carrying over too much bloat from old jailbreaks. What I'd love to do is just update (restore) to iOS8 and restore from a current JBed iOS 6.1.3 backup and have everything work fine, but after doing that from iOS5>6, I am afraid there will be some wonkiness not to mention wasted space.

So my planned course of action is: back up, restore to 8.1 (or 8.1.1 if a Mac method comes along shortly), follow the instructions here and use iBackupBot to extract my SMS history and merge that with a clean iOS8 back up, jailbreak and basically install everything, apps and Cydia tweaks, from scratch.

I am totally open to suggestions of better ways to do what I want to do. And thanks in advance!

I would still recommend to make a backup on whatever iOS version you're currently on (and make a copy of it somewhere else on your hard drive so that itunes doesn't delete it with all the new backups you're making)

just in case the sms database version/structure/etc has changed, you can "restore from backup" which will update the sms database

make a backup and extract the updated sms database file and merge into a clean iOS 8 backup

 

[jjk454ss]

I use iBackupBot, directions here:

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/03/06/how-to-back-up-restore-sms-messages/

Works great to transfer only text/sms messages and not all the other garbage