DJ Bri T.net The blog and portfolio of Brian Turchyn

8Mar/100

Backup and View Your iPhone SMS Messages For Free

Update: this does not work for iOS 4 and up, due to iTunes encrypting the backed up files. There is an easy fix for all of those with jailbroken devices, however. Stay tuned for that update!

Lately I wanted to backup some of my text messages from my iPhone 3GS onto my desktop, but couldn't figure out how to do that. After some quick research and some poking around, I was able to figure out how to view them quickly and easily.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible if you screw something up on your computer. It's not my problem if something breaks. Do this at your own risk (which should be pretty low, unless you're one of those people that shouldn't be allowed near a computer).

What you'll need

Let's Get Started

In a nutshell, the SMS system on the iPhone is just a carefully hidden SQLite database. All we have to do is find the file and open it up in the SQLite Browser.

  1. First, we need to locate the file that contains the SMS messages, which will be either:
    • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mdbackup
    • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata

    This will be in one of the following locations:

    • Windows Vista/7: C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
    • Windows XP or lower: C:\Documents and Settings\[Your User Name\Application Data\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
    • Mac OS X: User > Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backup >[iPhone ID]
  2. Copy this file to a new location to protect the file in case you accidentally screw something up (your Desktop, for example).
  3. Open up the new copy of the file in SQlite Browser, then select the "Browse Data" tab. Finally, select the "message" table from the "Table:" dropdown box

And that's all it takes! From here, you can export this as a CSV via File -> Export -> Table as CSV so you can import it into Excel, or manipulate it however else you wish. If I get the time, I'm going to write a quick tool to nicely export the messages to PDF so that they look good instead of being in a table. But, it's a nice fix for wanting to go through them on a computer, or do fulltext searches with the content.

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8Mar/100

New Music Monday Recommendation: Professor Kliq and SXSW

I know I said I was going to write a post about backing up your iPhone SMS messages, but that'll have to wait until later today (it'll be out in the afternoon: I promise!).

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a great artist. I mean, really great. Yes, there are talented artists out there, many of which are mainstream in today's society. That isn't what makes this artist great, however. Yes, he's talented. Very talented, as I hope you'll find out when you listen to some of his music. What makes this artist great is that he distributes all of his music for free.

Yes. Free.

If you are even remotely interested in electronic music, you'll love Professor Kliq (Mike Else). Making music since 1996, he has been making music for almost fifteen years, experimenting with many different forms of electronic music, taking both grassroots and modern styles into his experimentation. He has put out six albums, one EP, and one set of remixes. Do yourself a favor and give this a listen; if you appreciated electronic music half as much as I do, you'll love this.

Secondly, if you love music, chances are you've heard of SXSW, or South By Southwest. SXSW Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Even if you don't attend the events, many artists give out a free MP3 of their music to be distributed by SXSW on their website. The latest batch of 2010 entries was recently put up on BitTorrent, boasting a grand total of 1083 songs, and 5.43GB of disk space across two torrents. If you want the opportunity to be exposed to some amazing new music by independent artists who are freely (and legally!) giving away their music for you to listen to, check out the link below for more information.

http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/

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5Mar/101

March 5 2010 Photography Update

So I haven't put up any photos in a while. I've been on a bit of a dry spell, but I went through my archives and pulled out some that I think were better. Comments, as always, are welcome and encouraged.

Next Monday, I have an interesting post for all of you with iPhones. One thing I really like about the iPhone is that I don't have to delete text messages. I have a quick and free way for you to back up all of your text messages to read later on. There's a lot of paid services out there to do it, but you don't have to pay anyone for this quick-and-easy trick!

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