Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

sashie

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 9, 2009
82
0
Hong Kong
Is there a way to save my SMS into my computer?
There are a few important sms that I can't afford to delete without saving beforehand...
any help would be appreciated. thank you so much in advance. x
 
Can you copy/paste them into Notes as Notes are now synced ?

is there another method apart from this as for some particular users i would like to save the entire conversation :S and copying each sms would take forever to do :(

i tried using screenshots but that's really time consuming and messy to save too. :(
 
theres a really simple program that does it... i forget what its called. like its that easy...
 
Aren't the SMS convos on the iPhone in a SQLight db? I thought I saw them on there before. I'll browse around and see if I can't locate it again for you.

EDIT:
Found it. :D That was fast

/var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db

I guess you'll need to get a SQLite db reader to make much sense of it. I looked in with the Text Editor built into iFile and it was pretty unreadable but I could find the messages in there. A good viewer should make it usable.

Good luck!

Also, for anyone interested... the /var/mobile/Library folder has a lot of nifty stuff. :D All your voicemails are there and can be emailed via iFile or pulled and saved via SSH. Also your Calendar, Call Log, address book and notes can be found in there if you want to save or modify those (I know Cal and Address book sync already so probably good there. :D)
 
Providing you know the most basic of SQL commands, you can extract the data in the .db file into something useful.

Go here: http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite.html and download their free program which you can use to manually enter and execute SQL commands against an SQLite database. It will even let you export to a file. Then you have all your text messages in a readable format.

Hope this helps.
 
Also, for anyone interested... the /var/mobile/Library folder has a lot of nifty stuff. :D All your voicemails are there and can be emailed via iFile or pulled and saved via SSH.

Yes, and you can retrieve them through an SCP client and listen to them with Quicktime. They will be .amr format and Windows won't recognize them, but they'll open and play in Quicktime just the same.
 
Yes, and you can retrieve them through an SCP client and listen to them with Quicktime. They will be .amr format and Windows won't recognize them, but they'll open and play in Quicktime just the same.

SCP just uses SSH/SFTP though... doesn't it? Anyways, same thing. My desktops OSX and Ubuntu both recognize it just fine. Didn't realize you'd need to specify a player in Windows :p
 
SCP just uses SSH/SFTP though... doesn't it?

Technically, yes, the SCP protocol uses an underlying protocol like SSH to provide authentication and secure transmission.

An SCP program is the tool acting as a client, and to which I was referring. In Windows, one such program is WinSCP.

Anyways, same thing.

Yes, you're absolutely right, we're splitting hairs here. :D

My desktops OSX and Ubuntu both recognize it just fine. Didn't realize you'd need to specify a player in Windows :p

Yes, I know it probably plays flawlessly in OSX and Ubuntu, just like everything else does, and then does the laundry and takes out the trash and walks the dogs, too. But I'm stuck using Window$, so please don't hate. :p
 
After all the help we provided! OP has yet to return. :p Haha.

BTW, if you're not on windows a good alternative to WinSCP for browsing files is Fetch. Free software for FTP and SFTP on a Mac. Another common one is Fugu.

Or if you're hardcore you can just use Terminal and log in with sftp root@iPhoneIPaddress and then browse via command line and then "get" the file. :D

I'd recommend Fetch though. Really simple and great UI.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.