Comments on: How to Access and Read the iPhone SMS Text Message Backup Files

By: Delete Text Messages, iMessages, & Conversations from iPhone

Delete Text Messages, iMessages, & Conversations from iPhone — Sat, 04 May 2013 23:57:18 +0000

[...] a message has been deleted the only way to uncover it would be to manually sort through and read SMS backups, which isn’t the most user-friendly task in the world, and thus extremely unlikely to [...]

By: tferg

tferg — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:17:39 +0000

Yeswaydude:

Thanks for the time conversion, that helped me out quite a bit. However, I’ve linked to the SMS SQLite database via ODBC drivers to MS Access 2013. I’m using the dateadd(“s”,[date] + (-5 * 3600), “01/01/1970 00:00:00″) for the conversion in the query. However, this does not produce the correct results for some reason (using the UNIX Epoch time conversion). I had to use “01/01/2001 00:00:00″ to get the date I knew to be true (in my iPhone). Any idea why that is?

By: Suyog Bhobe

Suyog Bhobe — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:13:50 +0000

Here is a simple method to backup your SMS messages and do a lot more with them. After registering at delighta.com, just send your SMS messages to the delighta phone number and they will be backed up to a Google spreadsheet that delighta will create for you. You will also get the SMS messages as an email sent to your Gmail account.

By: Auens

Auens — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:08:39 +0000

Or you can simply use a program called iPhone SMS + MMS Extactor to help.

By: whisky

whisky — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 03:22:26 +0000

Problem solved. In SQLite, just query: SELECT datetime(date, ‘unixepoch’, ‘localtime’) as NewDATE from message
Or batch convert from unix epoch to regular datetime

By: whisky

whisky — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:23:10 +0000

Can you tell me exact sql command to convert it to common date/time?
I tried: datetime(date + (7 * 3600), ‘unixepoch’) and it show error

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:21:05 +0000

I have an issue. Everything worked except, there is no “address” choice to select???

By: Redmastif

Redmastif — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 02:38:27 +0000

If it’s asking for the encryption key, make sure you aren’t encrypting your iPhone backups from iTunes.

By: yeswaydude

yeswaydude — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 19:10:22 +0000

I read the SQLLite documentation and found that the following formula works (for the East Coast — change the -5 to your particular offset from GMT to see your local time) directly in MesaSQLite v4.0.0:

datetime(date + (-5 * 3600), ‘unixepoch’)

A date value of 1356825363 returns 2012-12-29 18:56:03 using this formula.

By: Kak

Kak — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 14:19:44 +0000

Well, I had troubles with the encryption code myself.

Here is what I did and hopefully you’ll get the same results as I did.

1. You first need to turn off “encode iphone backups”.
You can do that just in iTunes. When you plug in your iPhone, you can choose whether to encrypt your back-ups or not. Once you’ve chosen to not encrypt your backups you make a new one.

2. Now try to open the database with the app shown in the turtorial. Make sure you load up the newest backup file. (Look at the date)

If this still doesn’t work, don’t panick, it’s because you probably have a newer iPhone like I do. I think the newer iPhone backups are written in a slightly different code which the app in the turtorial above isn’t up to date to read it.

Well, you just need to get an updated version from the app. You can get that updated version here:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26079/mesasqlite

Once you’ve got that up and running you open the most recent not-encrypted database in that app and normaly that should work.

By: Kristina

Kristina — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:12:26 +0000

In order to view what you would like, go to the steps where you can filter according to a number. Under table content select messages > address > contains > (number) then click search. if you would not like to filter, just click show all or last 500. this will take up more time since it will be loading all texts

By: Kim

Kim — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 01:58:34 +0000

I’m trying to upload the data into the SQ Lite database program, but it’s just coming up as blank…

By: markus

markus — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 03:20:08 +0000

Hi kawaiix,
currently, I am facing the same problem like you: How can I convert the contents of the date field into something meaningful?

In a later post you mentioned that you had figured out the date thing after banging your head against the keyboard for several hours. Since I’d rather not do that to figure it out myself (and it would probably require me a couple of days) could you please give me a hint?

Best regards
Markus

By: Zorro

Zorro — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 21:09:28 +0000

No one has answered the “encryption code” question.
Facing the same problem here. Great blog!! but please help with what to do or what other app to use if encryption cannot be bypassed with MesaSQLite. Thank you!!

By: Anna

Anna — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:45:48 +0000

I have no file extensions. The backup was done without a encryption, but has a pass code to enter the phone. I have tried to enter that but it doesn’t work. Does anybody have any idea of a work around?