How To Backup Your Text Messages to Your Gmail Account

Backing up your text messages from your Android phone to your Gmail account is so simple there’s no reason to not back them up and make them search-friendly in the process. Read on to see how you can turn your Gmail account into an SMS vault.

What Do I Need?

It’s easy to lose your text messages. Everything from switching phones to fumble fingers can drop your messages in front of the digital reaper—just last night I managed to accidently delete a massive SMS thread when I really only intended to delete a single message that refused to send.

Backing up your SMS messages to your Gmail account is so simple, however, there’s no good reason not to do it. For this tutorial you’ll need three things:

• Your Android phone
• A free copy of  SMS Backup+
• A  Gmail Account

Got all that? Let’s get started!

Note: Technically, you can dig around the advanced settings of SMS Backup+ to reconfigure it to work with any IMAP-enabled email server. However, since it was designed to work with Gmail and works so well with Gmail’s search, threading, and starring functionality, we’re not going to mess with a good thing.

SMS Backup+ requires IMAP access to your Gmail account to function. Let’s take a moment and hop over to the Gmail account we’re planning on using with the application and check the status.

Login to your Gmail account and navigate to Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Check Enable IMAP. Scroll down and click Save Changes. That’s the only configuration you’ll need to do within your Gmail account.

Installing and Configuring SMS Backup+

With our Gmail account IMAP features toggled on, it’s time to install SMS Backup+. Hit up the Google Play Store and Download the App. After the application is installed, it’s time to get configuring. Launch the application. The first screen you’ll see will look like the following:

The first step is to set up the connection to your Gmail account. Tap Connect. The default browser on your Android phone will launch and you’ll be prompted to login to the Gmail account you want to use for backing up your messages. After you login you’ll need to authorize SMS Backup+ to utilize your Google account like so:

Click Grant Access. You’ll be prompted to begin a backup immediately or skip the initial backup:

Click Backup; we didn’t come all this way not to back things up! If you hit Skip then all the messages on your phone will be flagged as already backed up and will be ignored.

The backup process will start, and depending on how many messages you have, will take anywhere from a minute to a half hour to complete. It clips along at about a message per second:

You don’t even have to wait until the process is finished to jump over to the Gmail account and check the progress. Login to your Gmail account from a web browser. You’ll see a new label in the sidebar, SMS. Click on it:

Success! SMS Backup+ automatically backs up your SMS messages as well as your MMS messages. Not only are all of our text messages there but the pictures we’ve sent back and forth are backup up to Gmail along with the messages. Now that we’ve got everything humming along, let’s look at some advanced options.

Advanced SMS Backup+ Configuration

If you do nothing else before leaving this tutorial, you need to turn on the automatic backup feature. Leaving things up to manual backup in a sure fire way to forget. From the main screen tap Auto backup to turn it on and then tape on Auto backup settings to configure the frequency. The default configuration is a bit aggressive. You may wish to, as we did, decrease the frequency of backups and even set it to only backup one Wi-Fi if you’re backing up a lot of MMS and don’t want to burn through your mobile data quota.

After you have set up the automatic backup, return to the main screen and head into Advanced settings. There you can change the settings for backing up, restoring, and notifications. Under Backup there are some useful settings you may wish to toggle include turning off MMS backup (again, to save on data consumption, and creating a white list of contacts you want backed up (instead of the default where every single message is backed up).

There isn’t much to look at under the Restore settings, but you can take advantage of a handy Gmail-centric trick. When SMS Backup+ stores your messages in Gmail it creates a thread for each contact. You can tell SMS Backup+ to only restore the contacts with starred threads which allows you to quickly select which conversations are important enough to restore via the star system in Gmail.
So there you have it! All your text messages (including multimedia attachments) are backed up within Gmail where you can easily search them and restore them to your handset should the need arise.

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