It’s so simple to back up your text messages from your Android phone to your Gmail account that there’s no excuse not to do it and make them searchable in the process. Continue reading to learn how to convert your Gmail account into an SMS vault.
Related: How to Display Owner Information on the Lock Screen on Your Android Phone
Table of Contents
What You’ll Need
It’s simple to misplace your SMS messages. Everything from moving phones to shaky fingers may put your communications in front of the digital reaper—just last night, I mistakenly deleted a big SMS thread when I actually just wanted to delete a single message that refused to transmit.
Backing up your SMS texts to your Gmail account is so straightforward that there’s no excuse not to do it. You will need three items for this tutorial:
Note: Technically, you may modify SMS Backup+’s advanced settings to make it function with any IMAP-enabled email server. We’re not going to interfere with something that was meant to operate with Gmail and works. So well with Gmail’s search, threading, and starre functions.
Step One: Configure Your Gmail Account for IMAP Access
SMS Backup+ needs IMAP connection to your Gmail account to work. Let’s take a minute to verify the status of the Gmail account we intend to use with the program.
Navigate to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP in your Gmail account. Check the box next to “Enable IMAP,” then scroll down and click “Save Changes.”
If you haven’t done, go to the Google Security page and enable two-factor authentication.
Note: The two-factor authentication tutorial provides instructions for utilizing an authenticator app. It is not required for this.
Click “App Passwords” and provide your login information.
Set the drop-down box labeled “Select Apps” to “Other (Custom Name).”
Set a descriptive name, such as SMS Backup+, and then click “Generate.”
You will be given a password. Keep the window open, or save this password somewhere secure for the time being. You’ll need it in a flash.
Step Two: Install and Configure SMS Backup+
With our Gmail account’s IMAP functionality enabled, it’s time to install SMS Backup+. Go to the Google Play Store and get the app. After installing the application, you may begin customizing it. Start the program.
The first step is to login to your Gmail account. Tap “Advanced Settings.”
Next, tap “Custom IMAP Server.”
There’s a lot to say here. Change the “Authentication” setting from “XOAuth2 (Gmail)” to “Plain Text.”
Tap “Server Address,” enter “imap.gmail.com:933” as the IMAP server address, and then click “OK.”
Then proceed through the remaining choices, entering your email address, the password you just created, and ensuring that “Security” is set to TLS. You are not required to select “Trust All Certificates,” so leave it unchecked.
Return to the main menu and select “Backup.” We didn’t travel all this way to be ignored!
The backup process will begin and will take anything from a minute to a half hour (or longer!) to finish, depending on the number of messages you have. It moves at a few messages per second.
You don’t even have to wait till the procedure is done to verify the status of your Gmail account. Log in to your Gmail account using a web browser. You’ll notice a new label on the sidebar: “SMS.” Click on it.
Success! SMS Backup+ automatically backs up both SMS and MMS communications. Not only are all of our text conversations there, but so are the photographs we’ve sent. Now that everything is running smoothly, let’s have a look at some advanced choices.
Step Three (Optional): Turn On Automatic Backups
Turn on the automatic backup feature if you do nothing else before leaving this guide. Leaving things to manual backup is a good way to forget. Turn on “Auto backup” from the main screen, and then customize the frequency by tapping “Auto backup settings.” The default setup is a little too harsh. You may decide to reduce the frequency of backups, as we did.
You can even configure it to exclusively backup via Wi-Fi. That way, if you’re backing up a lot of MMS, you won’t deplete your mobile data.
Return to the main screen and navigate to Advanced Settings after you’ve configured the automatic backup. There, you may customize the backup, restore, and notification settings. Under “Backup,” you can change several important settings, such as turning off MMS backup (again, to conserve data usage) and creating a whitelist of contacts you want stored up (instead of the default where every single message is backed up).
There isn’t much to look at under the Restore options, but you may use a Gmail-specific method. SMS Backup+ establishes a thread for each contact when it keeps your texts in Gmail. You may instruct SMS Backup+ to only recover contacts with starred threads, allowing you to quickly choose which conversations are significant enough to restore using Gmail’s star system.
That’s all there is to it! All of your text messages (including multimedia files) are stored in Gmail, where you can simply look for them and restore them to your handset if necessary.