Gamaze

I just upgraded my HTC Hero Android phone to the new Nexus One (N1) from Google. First impressions are really great, and there are plenty of in depth reviews out there so I won’t cover that part. On the other hand, what I wanted to do was to transfer all my SMS text messages, the call logs and the access points (APNs) from the Hero to my new N1. Unfortunately, Google has upgraded the format of Android’s SMS storage as the Hero is running Android 1.5 while the N1 one is on v.2.1, so just creating a backup on the Hero and restoring the messages on the N1 was not possible without some tweaks. So far, this has been tested only for HTC Hero to Nexus One, but I’m sure other < v.2.0 Android phones can use the same process.

There are plenty of backup and restore tools out there, I tried a few before ending up using the simple apps family from Ritesh Sahu called APN Backup & Restore, SMS Backup & Restore, and Call Logs Backup & Restore. The reason for selecting these was just that they created simple text based XML based files of the backup data that can be easily edited – and they are free. I’m sure there are several other backup apps that can do the same as there are probably hundreds of backup tools for Android phones.

Do migrate your old date to your N1 phone, you first have to install the 3 apps mentioned above on your old phone and create backups of your APNs, Call Logs and SMSs (just search for them on the Android Market, no hidden costs). Note! You have to run each backup app separately.

These will be stored on your local SD card in your phone in the following folders:

• APNs: /sdcard/APNBackupRestore/
• Call Logs:/sdcard/CallLogBackupRestore/
• SMSs:/sdcard/SMSBackupRestore/

Before you can restore these to your N1 (using the same apps) you have to edit the SMS backup XML file a bit. The APN and Call Log backup files can be directly used without editing.

On your computer, open the /sdcard/SMSBackupRestore/nameofSMSbackupfile.xml in your favourite text editor. Mount the SD card by connecting the USB cable to your phone. Make sure the text editor has a “search and replace” function, e.g. Windows Notepad will do well. If using the Notepad, select Edit => Replace… and do the following when you get the popup:

Find what: toa="129"

Replace with: toa="null"

and press the Replace All button. The repeat the same process for any toa=”133”, toa"=”145”, toa"=”161” appearances as well. In practice. you have to replace all toa=”###” and sc_toa=”###” (# stands for any number here) entries with toa=”null” respectively sc_toa=”null”. I did not have any other numbers than 129, 133, 145, and 161 in my XML file but you can always search for toa=”1 to make sure you do not have any other values. They all have to be replace by null.

One done, save the file back to the same folder on your SD card and insert the card in your N1 phone. After installing the same 3 apps you can now chose the Restore function and select the backup files. Please make sure you select the modified SMS.xml file or you will get an error message and the process will fail.

I hope (and I’m sure) that there is an easier way to do all this this but this is how I got my data migrated without any problems. Hopefully Google will solve this for future Android releases as upgrading your phone really need to be easy.

Mattias android, Mobile, Tutorials android, backup, migrate, restore, SMS