How to back up your Android SMS & MMS messages

By Michael, founder of ChatAttic · September 2026 · 7 min read

Your text messages and picture messages live in exactly one place: the phone in your pocket. There's no "download my texts" button, and no simple way to read years of SMS and MMS on a computer. This guide shows you how to pull a complete, open backup of your Android messages into a single file — and how to turn that file into a clean, readable archive you own.

Why your texts are more fragile than you think

SMS (plain texts) and MMS (picture and group messages) are stored on the device itself, not in some account you can log into later. That has consequences most people only discover at the worst moment:

• A new phone or a factory reset wipes them. Unless you deliberately moved the messages across, switching phones can leave years of conversations behind.
• Your carrier doesn't keep a copy you can read. They may log that a message was sent for billing, but they don't hand you a searchable transcript of what it said — and they purge even that after a short window.
• The photos in MMS are especially easy to lose. A birthday snapshot someone texted you five years ago exists only inside that thread, at whatever resolution it arrived.

The fix is to get the messages off the phone and into an open file you control, while they're still there to save.

The standard tool: SMS Backup & Restore

The widely-used app for this is SMS Backup & Restore by SyncTech. It's free on the Google Play Store, it's been the go-to tool for years, and it exports your messages to a plain, open .xml file — no proprietary format, no account required.

1. Install SMS Backup & Restore from the Google Play Store and open it.
2. Grant the permissions it asks for — Messages and Storage — so it can read your texts and write the backup file.
3. Tap Set up a backup.
4. Choose what to include. Tick Messages (SMS) and MMS. You can also include call logs if you like — ChatAttic reads the messages, so call logs are optional.
5. Pick a local backup destination: save to the phone's storage or an SD card, or to a cloud folder you control (such as your own Google Drive or Dropbox). Avoid anywhere you can't get the raw file back out of.
6. Run the backup. When it finishes you'll have an XML file named something like sms-20260914153000.xml.

Then move that .xml onto your computer — over a USB cable from the phone's storage, or by downloading it from the cloud folder you chose. Once it's on a computer you're on solid ground: it's an ordinary file you can copy, back up, and read years from now.

What's actually inside the XML

The backup is one plain-text XML file, and everything you'd want is right there in it:

• Every SMS carries its phone number, the contact name, a timestamp, whether you sent or received it, and the full message text.
• Every MMS is stored as a set of parts — the text of the message plus any attached image — grouped with the conversation it belongs to.

Because it's just XML, nothing about it expires or phones home. It's readable in principle by any tool that understands the format — the catch is that no human wants to read raw XML by hand.

Turning the backup into an archive you own

A single sms-….xml is a faithful backup, but it isn't yet something you'd sit down and read. To get there — a clean record grouped by who you were talking to, with nothing duplicated — the work is:

1. Parse the XML and separate each SMS and each MMS, keeping its sender, timestamp and text.
2. Pull the images back out of the MMS parts and keep them alongside the messages they arrived with.
3. De-duplicate, so that two overlapping backups — say one from last year and one from today — collapse into a single copy of each message instead of two.
4. Group everything by contact and conversation, sorted by time, and write it into plain files you can open, search, and hand down.