How To Backup Your mobile Text Messages to Your Gmail Account
Now Backing up your SMS messages to your Gmail account is simple, however, it`s good to backup your messages regularly.
For this follow these simple steps:
- Android phone
- A free copy of SMS Backup
- A Gmail account
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.
Configuring Your Gmail Account for IMAP Access
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| Backup Mobile Contacts To Gmail |
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.
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 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:
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| Backup Mobile Contacts To Gmail |
Click Grant Access. You’ll be prompted to begin a backup immediately or skip the initial backup:
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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:
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| Backup Mobile Contacts To Gmail |
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.