1) you need access to the computer they synch their iphone to.
2) you can only grab stuff after they have done a synch recently. there was an iphone update 1 week ago, so hopefully he upgraded to get the new features
3) i am not positive if messages deleted are gone forever or not. i know that you may not be able to get everything. if he does not clear the old texts then you are set.
There is a backup that is done from the phone each time you synch. It is a set of compressed database files, that are somewhat of a pain to deal with.
Here are the locations of the backup files
If it is a mac:
/Users/NAME/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
If it is a PC:
Documents and Settings\NAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup
Once you are in there, there should be at least one directory with a very long string of random characters. At this point I would copy everything under that Backup directory - i copied to an external drive so i would not have to do the rest of the work from the same computer.
If there are multiple directories then that means you have multiple to go through. I would start with the most recent one (they should have timestamps before you copy them over). If they deleted messages but after an earlier synch you can see how it would be helpful to go through the older backups. if they dont delete messages then you probably just need to go through the newest one
You can rename those long directory names to be the date if you want. shorter plus easier to sort later once you have copied and the orig timestamps are gone.
Once you are in the directory you will see a bunch of files that end with .mdbackup. You need to sift through those and figure out which one contains the SMS messages.
The easiest way to do this is to use a tool called grep. If you are on a PC for your sleuth work you can get a copy
here. I am sure there is something similar for a mac, just google it.
You will want to grep through all those files for 'SMS'. On my PC i did this by going to start->RUN and typed in cmd. This opens a window and then i ran the following command
grep.exe SMS c:\path-to-wherever-the-directory-with-mdbackupfiles-is\*
(hopefully you can figure it out, if not let me know)
What returns from that command is a list of maybe 5 files. One of those 5 is the text message backup file.
From there, there are 3 options.
1)using a script uncompress the file and they try to view it with a sqlite3 browser (which only works some of the time for me) - by far the hardest
2) same thing but after running the script look at the file by hand with notepad - hard to read, especially when you are reading in shock, horror and tears.
3) Go to
this web site. On that site you can upload the file and it will uncompress it, read it in and create a csv file which you can open with excel. This is by far the easiest way, but you are also uploading your file to some site that i guarantee is saving your file on their server to do god knows what to. i guess the risk reward was there for me to just use it.
You may need to do all the files until you get the right one that produces output of text messages.
Once you open the file in excel there are a couple of key things to note. There is a column called flag. If that is a 2 that means it was an incoming text. 3 is outgoing, also i think blank is outgoing.
There is a column for the date but it is in epoch time which is useless. I wrote a script to covert all to regular time, but if you want to know when a particular message was sent you can do them one of a time by going to
this site I wish you the best of luck.
