One of the biggest drags about switching to a new phone is trying to figure out how you are going to transfer all of your information from the previous device to the new. If text messages are part of this concern, the drag can be much worse, leading to a lot of users simply letting their old messages go rather than deal with it.
Thankfully, if you are hell-bent on keeping those messages, it is absolutely possible. There are a lot of processes of which you can accomplish this, but a lot of them require you to spend tedious amounts of time and labor to do so. However, there are a few ways to do it that are less painful and a lot more automatic.
Via this process, you will only require two simple apps. One of which will install on a Windows desktop PC, and the other an app for your Android device. Both apps can be obtained for free, however the desktop app does have purchasable versions that will speed things up for you.
- The first app, is WP Message Backup, which you will want to install onto your PC.
- By default, the application will allow you to backup 100 messages at a time. If you don’t have many messages, this is great. However, if you have more, you can buy into the application as high as $5.49 for unlimited messages (totally worth it if it saves you a day’s worth of troubleshooting).
- You will sign into your Microsoft account used for your phone, via this app. It will then scan for all of your text messages on the account and gather them together. Once it is finished, you can either choose the ones you want to keep, or select all if you prefer to keep them all. Then you would export to “XML” format (for Android).
- Take the newly created XML file, and copy it over to your Android phone’s storage space. Now download SMS Backup and Restore (by Carbonite).
- With this app (which is completely free), find the file you just copied over to your Android phone. Restore the information, and sit back and relax as all of your messages are added to your new Android phone.
The entire process is pretty easy. In our test of it, we did use the unlimited version of the application, which made a world’s difference, as we truly did put it to the test with over 50,000 messages. It took what felt like forever to go through all of that data and save it to a file over 200MB in size. The restore also took a little time to accomplish, although not nearly as long as it took to gather it all into a file.
The restore process for us was not perfect. It ended claiming that around 1,900 of the messages weren’t restored, which isn’t too bad given the total number it had to sort through. Also, some messages appeared under alternative numbers under profiles, causing conversations to sometimes become split into two for certain users (ie, half the messages appeared under someone’s mobile number, and the other half under their home number). So the process isn’t 100%, but it was more than doable. Plus, the average person may not have so many messages, especially if you only checked so many conversations to back out vs all of them.
Some users may find 100% success and some may experience what we did. Regardless, it was much faster than some of the other methods we have tried or discussed, which could have taken hours of manual labor, vs a few clicks and waiting for the results.
