SMS Backup & Restore: the setup guide — and the missing piece

SMS Backup & Restore (by SyncTech) has been Android's standard text-message backup app for over a decade — free, reliable, tens of millions of installs. It does two things brilliantly: back up and restore. What it doesn't do is let you read a backup — search five years of messages, print a conversation, save a thread as PDF. This guide covers the proper setup, where your files live, and that missing piece.

Set it up so you never lose a text again (5 minutes)

  1. Install SMS Backup & Restore from Google Play and open it.
  2. Tap Set up a backup. Include Messages (and Phone calls if you want call logs). Turn on MMS if photos in texts matter to you — backups get much larger but photos survive.
  3. Upload to Google Drive when asked — this is the step that saves you when the phone is lost or dead, not just wiped.
  4. Choose Daily or Weekly schedule. Set it and forget it.

Where your backup files are

Files are named sms-YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.xml. Look in the phone's SMSBackupRestore folder, and in Google Drive (search sms-). If you set up scheduling years ago and forgot, Drive may be quietly holding a long archive — which is exactly what you want to find when retrieving deleted texts.

The missing piece: reading a backup without restoring it

The app's Restore merges a backup's messages back onto a phone — the right tool for a new phone, the wrong tool for "I just want to find/print something." For reading, open the XML directly:

Read, search & print your backup — free

Open your backup in the free reader →

Common questions

My XML file won't open / the viewer hangs. Backups with MMS photos reach hundreds of MB or more, which chokes text editors and most online viewers. Our reader streams the file instead of loading it whole — 2GB files open in seconds, even on a phone.

Restore vs. transfer to a new phone? Restore is the right tool there: install the app on the new phone, point it at your Drive backup, restore. Reading is for everything else — archives, evidence, finding that one address from 2023.

Password-protected backups? If you enabled encryption in the app, our reader can't open those yet — keep an unencrypted copy if you want them readable elsewhere.

Not affiliated: SMS Backup & Restore is SyncTech's app; this guide and the reader are from Essex Software. We built the reader because "how do I actually open these XML files?" was the one question the ecosystem never answered well.