Transferring SMS messages to another phone

[jehoshua7]

Looking at transferring everything from a Samsung Galaxy S4 to a Samsung Galaxy S7. Have just used

aft-mtp-mount ~/myphone

your device does not have android EditObject extension, mounting read-only

which is expected. I can see the Card and the Phone in Dolphin, and now just backing it all up via Beyond Compare (a great tool).

For another phone, I use SMS backup and it also restores, yet I have not found a use for the restore as yet. Can android-file-transfer transfer the SMS messages to the S7 ? So that they are viewable. I assume it will need some sort of export on the S4 , copy over the AFT and then an import. Although the std SMS app doesn't do export/imports I think...lol

[whoozle]

MTP does not provide any facilities to export/import SMS, if you seen any software that can actually do it, then post it here.
Normally you can export SMS to the file on your SD card, and then restore it on the other phone.

[jehoshua7]

MTP does not provide any facilities to export/import SMS, if you seen any software that can actually do it, then post it here. Normally you can export SMS to the file on your SD card, and then restore it on the other phone.

It appears SMS is in ram, in some database, yet if the files on the phone are not all visible, I cannot access them. It would be interesting to access at a lower level.
Regards software for SMS, Samsung have a app called 'Smart Switch' and it seems files can be pushed via bluetooth to the other phone or a computer. There are a lot of products that claim to do it, see

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=samsung+phone+transfer+sms&atb=v322-2&ia=web

I have used the app "SMS backup & Restore" ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore&gl=US ) to backup , but haven't used the restore.

It would be an interesting task/project to find out where/how the SMS messages are stored. I did get ANBOX going ( see https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/10/anbox-run-android-apps-ubuntu/ ) on Kubuntu and it worked okay, so that would be where I would start, to see the file structure,etc.