How to Back Up Your Text Messages to Your Gmail Account – To Back Up Your Text Messages from your Android phone to your Gmail account made easy. With this, there’s no reason stop backing up your messages to your Gmail account.
This article will guide you on how to do this.
How to Back Up Your Text Messages – Requirement – What is needed
Making changes from your old phone to a new one makes it easier to lose your messages. Sometimes, you might want to delete a single message and you end up deleting the whole message history and start thinking of how to restore it back.
Backing up your SMS messages to your Gmail account is so simple. For this tutorial you’ll need three(3) basic things:
- Your Android phone
- A Gmail account
- SMS Backup+ gotten through Google Play Store
Steps to Backup your Messages to Gmail Account
1st Step: Configure Your Gmail Account for IMAP Access
- Click “Enable IMAP“
- SMS Backup+ needs IMAP access to your Gmail account to function. Let us take a moment and hop over to the Gmail account we’re planning on using with the application and check the status.
- Login to Gmail account and go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Check “Enable IMAP.” Scroll down and click “Save Changes.”
- Then, proceed to the Google Security page and set up two-factor authentication, if you’re not using it already.
Note: The tutorial for two-factor authentication includes instructions for using an authenticator app. It isn’t necessary for this.
- Click “App Passwords” and provide your login information.
- Click the drop-down box named “Select Apps” and set it to “Other (Custom Name).”
- Click “Select App”, then select “Other” from the drop-down menu.
- Set the name to something descriptive — like SMS Backup+ — and click “Generate.”
- A password will be provided. Keep the window open, or temporarily save this password somewhere safe. You’ll need it in just a minute.
See Also: How to Share Google Photos and Videos | Android Smartphone or Tablet
2nd Step: Install and Configure SMS Backup+
With Gmail account IMAP features toggled on, lets get down to installing SMS Backup+. search the Google Play Store and download the app. After the application is installed, configure it. Make launch of the application.
The first step is to set up the connection to Gmail account. Tap “Advanced Settings.”
Tap “Advanced Settings.”
- Choose “Custom IMAP Server.”
- Choose “Authentication” and change it from “XOAuth2 (Gmail)” to “Plain Text.”
- Choose “Server Address,” config. the IMAP server address to “imap.gmail.com:933” and click “OK.”
- Type the server address into the text field, then hit “OK.”
Now, check the rest of the options — enter your email, the password you just generated, and make sure the “Security” is set to TLS. You don’t have to tick “Trust All Certificates,” so leave it unticked.
- Go back to the main menu, and click “Backup”.
- Tap “Backup“
The backup process will start, and depending on how many messages you have, will take anywhere from a minute to a half hour (or longer!) to complete. It chugs along at a few messages per second.
SMS Syncing to Gmail.
Login to Gmail account to check the progress. Log in to your Gmail account from a web browser. You’ll see a new label in the sidebar: “SMS”. Click on it and you will see the SMS/MMS shown in the gmail inbox.
SMS Backup+ automatically backup 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.
Read: How to Disable Automatic App Updates in Android
3rd Step: Turn On Automatic Backups – This is an optional step.
- Setting auto backup on is of the essence to avoid losing messages to the manual settings.
- From the main screen, tap “Auto backup” to turn it on
- Then select “Auto backup settings” to configure the frequency. The default configuration is a bit belligerent. Decrease in back up frequency might be necessary.
Options to decrease sync frequency.
Wifi Setting
You can even set it to only backup over Wi-Fi. That way, if you’re backing up a lot of MMS, you won’t burn through your mobile data.
Advanced backup settings.
Based on setting up the automatic backup, visit the main screen and go to 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, including turning off MMS backup (again, to save on data consumption), and creating a whitelist of contacts you want backed up (instead of the default where every single message is backed up).
The Restore settings does not have much to look into, but you can make advantage of Gmail-centric trick. When SMS Backup+ stores your messages in Gmail it creates a thread for each contact. You can make 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.
Following the above steps, will leave all your text messages (including multimedia attachments) backed up within Gmail where you can search and restore them to your handset at ease if need be.
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