In talking with people that send text messages (SMS), one of the most frequent things I hear is that they wish they could save some of their SMS messages. Many of them have lost their messages forever if their phone is damaged/replaced/upgraded, or they run out of room and are forced to delete them. There is a very useful application for Android called SMS Backup that helps you save your SMS messages to Gmail so you can keep them forever.
SMS Backup is a great free program for Google Android devices that allows you to backup your SMS messages on a regular frequency or manually. You simply sign in with your Google account (gmail.com and Google Apps accounts are supported – make sure you have IMAP enabled), and you’re done!
There are some additional settings you can change, such as to back up automatically or manually, marking the items as read in Gmail, what label to apply to the messages (SMS is the default), and how many items to back up at a time.
I have been able to show this application to several Android device users and it allowed them to quickly save their SMS messages when they moved from their T-Mobile G1 to the myTouch 3G. There is an excellent User Guide available on the project website which walks through all of the preferences. But it’s a fairly intuitive program and is pretty much something you setup once and it works for you in the background.