Help How to recover SMS messages from SMS.DB. Deceased person

[flyingdutch06]

Hello Android gurus,

I would be VERY gratefull if someone can help me with this:

Short version: A week ago a very good girlfriend send me a couple of SMS messages. I only could read some of them and then... my phone started to bug, install all kinds of cr*p etc. To try to solve the problem I reinitialized the phone, (after making a backup on an SDcard) , tried a hard reset, but nothing. Brought it to a shop but they said "nop, we cannot restore it properly". Finally I bought a new phone. So that's not the problem. Unfortunately, a couple of hours after she send me her last messages this girlfriend died from cancer, and I would have liked to read what she wrote to me. So I have this SDcard where I found a file sms.db which (I suppose) contains these messages. Is there any way to recover what's in there? I don't need it on my new phone. Any format would be fine. A text file or whatever.

Long version:
2 years ago I bought an Huawei G740. And because it had a lot of bloatware on it I rooted it with SuperSU. Don't ask me how, because this was 2 years ago and I don't remember how I did it. I have some reasonable IT skills , but I'm far from an Android guru. Anyway, phone worked fine for 2 years without any problems. Then, as described above, just after I received these messages from her (and I didn't have time to read), my phone was powered off. Don't know why because I never power it off. When I started it again, it started to install all kinds of cr*p. Useless apps, links to porn sites, popup windows with adds etc. And worse, the whole phone became unusable. It kept switching from one application to the other, showing all kinds of ads etc. So I decided to do a reset from the parameter menu (backup on SD card and reinitialise). That didn't solve the problem. So I did a hard rest (Power+volume up) and wiped everything. Same problem. As soon as I start it, all cr*p comes back. So I brought it to a "professional phone repair shop". Next day the verdict was "No, we cannot do anything because of this SuperSU app". And I bought a new phone (a Samsung Galaxy). So my phone problem is solved, but now remains the question : how do I recover the sms messages that are on this SD card???

I would be EXTREMELY grateful if someone can recover what's in there. I can send the sms.db (or any other file that you may require) to whoever thinks he can recover it.

 

[Shehab0]

The lost or deleted SMS can be recovered from the Android devices directly, the prerequisites: act fast before the data been overwritten, phones get rooted, a professional recovery tool.

 

[Hadron]

The obvious question is how did you back the phone up? There isn't a default tool that all android phones have for this, and usually how you restore depends on how the backup was done.

SMS are normally stored in the /data partition, in a file called /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db. So I guess it's possible that your backup copied it to sd with a different name (or that Huawei give it a different name in the first place). Since you have a different phone now it would probably be a long shot to just replace your current message db with this one (which would require root anyway) - there is a reason why portable SMS backups aren't just copies of the database.

Have you tried something simple like opening a copy on a computer? It should be an sqlite database, so while formatting may not be the most readable there should be something that you can use for this. I've even been able to see read some messages directly from my db using X-plore file manager on my phone, though navigating (e.g. identifying which thread you are looking at) isn't easy that way. But a better database viewer should make it a bit easier, especially on a computer with a larger screen.