I’ve been looking around to find a good, privacy respecting way to sync my messages between phones. I decided I’m going to use SyncThing so I don’t have to mess around with a server. The only problem with this is that I haven’t been able to find any apps that work on modern Android that routinely backup and import messages from a file/folder into the messages database. Does anyone know any app that might do this?
I’ve used SMS Backup & Restore for several years to do exactly what you describe.
Everything backs up to a local folder on my phone and I sync to my home server. The app can sync backups to a cloud storage, but it isn’t required.
Same, came here to suggest this one but was beaten to it.
Same. This is exactly what I do. I’m on my 5th Android phone since 2009, and I still have all my call logs and SMSs going back until then, because I backup from my old phone and restore to my new phone on every upgrade.
There’s even an OSS tool for converting it all to Excel now.
Its on Github, let me look for it.
SMS Backup & Restore has been my go to since about 2010, across 5 phones.
Edit: https://github.com/prettydeep/sms-log-convert.git