Restore SMS history from one phone to another

Jun 25, '09 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: pottypigeon

Imagine you've purchased a new and shiny iPhone 3GS. Imagine as well that you had an equally-shiny iPhone 3G since day one of its introduction (more or less one year). You set up your 3GS as a new phone in iTunes, in order not to mess with settings and whatnot, only to discover that one year's worth of SMS are lost in your new unit!

Well...fear no more, as you can easily restore the SMS database into your new unit, starting from the backup of the old unit. Read on for the how-to...

First, disable the option Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected in iTunes before starting this procedure (assuming it's enabled in the Summary tab of your iPhone). Then follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the folder ~/Libary » Applications Support » MobileSync » Backup.
  2. In the folder found above, there will be n subfolders containing your n iPhone backup sets (those iTunes makes when you connect your iPhone to your computer). In my case, I had two subfolders, one for the 3G and the other for the 3GS. The name of each folder will be a string of 40 randomish hex characters.
  3. Sort the view by date--this will let you easily tell which subfolder belongs to which phone; enter the one that belongs to the phone that contains your SMS history (or the source iPhone, if you like). The other will be named destination iPhone.
  4. Option-drag this latter folder to the desktop for safety, in case something goes south along the journey.
  5. Copy these two files...
    3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata
    3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mdinfo

    ...from the source iPhone backup folder to the destination iPhone backup folder. The Finder will warn you about overwriting the existing files; just do it.
  6. Connect your destination iPhone to the computer and fire up iTunes (since it shouldn't have started by itself if you followed the initial note).
  7. When your iPhone appears under Devices in your iTunes sidebar, Control-click it and select the 'Restore from Backup...' option.
  8. Select the backup related to your device (i.e. the backup of the destination iPhone that you just 'patched' with the two files coming from the source iPhone).
  9. Have a cup of coffee and let the magic happen!
Once the restore process completes (mine took about five minutes in total), your new iPhone will be untouched in every way, except it will contain all of your beloved short messages. Of course, this procedure might be extended to other kind of information to be patched from one phone to another ... more to come (when I'll discover something new).

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