After just getting a new phone and watching the slow restore time for my sms messages, I decided it was time have a bit of a tidy up.
I had a search around for a tool which would trim my sms message history, but my searches didn't show up anything useful - please tell me if I have missed something obvious.
Not knowing much about programming Android I had an idea after all it is just simple data transformation. One of the utilities I used to transfer sms messages between phone was SMS Backup & Restore which writes its backup to an XML file, if I could read this file with something like Powershell, then maybe I could trim the older messages.
Also whilst searching I came across another useful utility which backs up your sms you your gmail account.
So here's what I did.
- Backup all sms to gmail using SMS Backup+
- Switch on flight mode - so that any new sms messages wouldn't get missed.
- Backup all sms to an XML file using SMS Backup & Restore
- Run my Powershell script over the sms backup file and create a copy with only the messages I want to keep.
- Delete all sms messages from the phone - if you don't the restore below leaves the old ones
- Use SMS Backup & Restore to restore the trimmed down message list
Here's the Powershell file Powershell SMS
{jcomments lock}
