How to Retrieve SMS Text Messages from an iPhone Backup
Saturday, January 31, 2009Note that these instructions are only applicable to Mac OS X, and the extractor requires Leopard. I found the SQLite commands in an excellent Google Code article, but that method required that I jailbreak my phone and install an SFTP server, which interested me not at all.
- Download the free iPhone/iPod Touch Backup Extractor program from SuperCrazyAwesome.com.
- Run it. The program will give you a list of available iPhone backups that iTunes has made when you sync your phone with your computer. Choose the latest one.
- From the list of apps whose data you could extract, choose "Other Programs" at the bottom. Choose a folder on disk to extract the data to -- it will make a number of folders and files, so you should create a new folder for it.
- Open Terminal. Change your current directory to "Other Files/Library/SMS" within the folder that you chose in the previous step.
- Type the following commands, hitting the return key after each:
sqllite3 sms.db
.output output.txt
SELECT * FROM message;
.quit - You can now close Terminal. In the "Other Files/Library/SMS" within the folder to which you extracted the backups, there is now a file called output.txt. This is a pipe-delimited text file that you can import into Excel. Some of the columns are easily recognizable -- the phone number to which the text message came from or was sent to, and the text of the message. To get all of the messages exchanged with a particular person, simply sort by the phone number column to get them all together.
Labels: iPhone
