Skip Stocks
Lurker
I have >5gb of text messages that are resident in my internal memory. How do I move the data to the SD card? TIA
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Help How to move data?
- Thread starter Skip Stocks
- Start date
5GB??? Presumably a lot of these are MMS, because I can't imagine how anyone could amass 5GB of SMS.
The short answer is that if you still want to be able to view them in your message app (Textra I assume) you can't. The Android message database (which is common to all SMS/MMS apps) lives in /data/data and you can't reassign its location. If you had root access you could copy it to SD, but the message system would still use the copy in /data/data and if you removed that no SMS/MMS app would be able to see your messages. If you don't have root you can't see, copy or move that file anyway.
You can of course make backups with one of the myriad SMS backup tools. If you can find an app that lets you view the backup (either on Android or a computer) then you could back up, save the backup wherever you like and then delete the threads or messages you don't need to read in your message app. Whether you can view the backup will depend on what app you make the backup with: there is no standard, so each will use its own format.
But as for what you are really wanting, to tell Android to move the SMS/MMS database to SD and then carry on as before, I'm sorry but that's not possible(*).
(*) OK, in principle if you were rooted and know your linux you could move the database to SD and put a soft link in its original location to the new one. I've not heard of anyone do that, but in principle it could work. At your own risk though.
The short answer is that if you still want to be able to view them in your message app (Textra I assume) you can't. The Android message database (which is common to all SMS/MMS apps) lives in /data/data and you can't reassign its location. If you had root access you could copy it to SD, but the message system would still use the copy in /data/data and if you removed that no SMS/MMS app would be able to see your messages. If you don't have root you can't see, copy or move that file anyway.
You can of course make backups with one of the myriad SMS backup tools. If you can find an app that lets you view the backup (either on Android or a computer) then you could back up, save the backup wherever you like and then delete the threads or messages you don't need to read in your message app. Whether you can view the backup will depend on what app you make the backup with: there is no standard, so each will use its own format.
But as for what you are really wanting, to tell Android to move the SMS/MMS database to SD and then carry on as before, I'm sorry but that's not possible(*).
(*) OK, in principle if you were rooted and know your linux you could move the database to SD and put a soft link in its original location to the new one. I've not heard of anyone do that, but in principle it could work. At your own risk though.
M
Member 1919122
Guest
Where is the 5gb of data residing?
Please be specific, example :
Android /data/Textra /
Please be specific, example :
Android /data/Textra /
Skip Stocks
Lurker
Dude, I wish I knew. Android folder management is very confusing to me - files & folders appear to be hidden or otherwise unavailable to display/manage. There is no folder structure under android/data/textra.
There is one for android/data/com.textra/files/emojis-packages which has zero items; which makes me wonder why it's there, but whatever.
Under "Internal Storage" there is a folder for Textra, which has two items: Media (1 item) and Tmp (2 items). The Media folder contains a folder called Textra (not making this up) which contains zero items. The Tmp folder contains two files: random.last (37b), and contact.vcf (7.06kb).
Thanks for the suggestion - any other ideas?
Skip Stocks
Lurker
Thanks. That seems ... short sighted, architecturally, but I'm not a phone system guy, so I'm sure there were reasons. At any rate, whether SMS or MMS, is there a way to sort messages by size perhaps?
Thanks for the info!
M
Member 1919122
Guest
Please read Hadron's reply, unless you have a rooted device you cannot access those files.
Skip Stocks
Lurker
I apologize...I thought you asked for the location of the files. Perhaps I was mistaken?
At any rate, my outstanding question is this: is there a way to sort messages by size so I can see if there are any major culprits that stick out?
Thanks for all your help!
Sorting by size would have to be a feature of the particular message app. I've never seen it in any app I've used. MMS generally have a size limit anyway, but my rule of thumb would be that any containing videos will almost certainly be larger than any others, and it will be MMS rather than SMS that are using the space (I barely use MMS, and my most recent SMS/MMS backup of > 10k messages is 11MB, so 5GB is either 4-5 million SMS or else it's MMS that are the culprits - and a lot of them even so).
I'm not privy to the reasons behind the choices, but privacy is probably one consideration: you don't want every app to be able to read your messages, and data stored on microSD are not secure (most microSD cards use fat32 filesystems, which don't even support access control lists). Actually come to think of it fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, so a 5GB message database would be a problem too - the internal storage, which uses the ext4 filesystem, is definitely better for storing large databases. It's also worth considering that microSD cards are a lot less reliable than the internal storage and wear out faster, so while they are fine for media (written once, read occasionally) they are not a good choice for apps' internal databases or caches (frequently, even constantly, updated, so write cycles). Actually if you have anything important on a microSD card, make sure you have a backup somewhere else, because those things can and do fail suddenly.
I'm not privy to the reasons behind the choices, but privacy is probably one consideration: you don't want every app to be able to read your messages, and data stored on microSD are not secure (most microSD cards use fat32 filesystems, which don't even support access control lists). Actually come to think of it fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, so a 5GB message database would be a problem too - the internal storage, which uses the ext4 filesystem, is definitely better for storing large databases. It's also worth considering that microSD cards are a lot less reliable than the internal storage and wear out faster, so while they are fine for media (written once, read occasionally) they are not a good choice for apps' internal databases or caches (frequently, even constantly, updated, so write cycles). Actually if you have anything important on a microSD card, make sure you have a backup somewhere else, because those things can and do fail suddenly.
Skip Stocks
Lurker
Copy that. Thanks for the info!