I'm a bit of an archivist. I've got my emails running back to when I set up my first mail server in 1985, copies of the fanzine I printed in 1977, lyric sheets from the '90s, and such.

I do actually refer to those archived pieces. Just because a thing is designed as a read-and-discard medium, doesn't mean you'll never want to refer back to it.

Nowadays, more and more conversations happen via text messages on my phone. Unlike emails, or even phone photos, I can't just copy them from phone to computer.

So, this week, I decided I was going to get those things off my phone, and started looking on the web for clues.

The cute little "Archive" menu selection did not move the conversation to my Google drive, despite what ChatGPT assured me was the simplest way to get the conversations.

My next attempt to extract data from the phone resulted in a cute little file that contained information about the phone manufacturer, model number and who owned it.

I pretty much knew that.

There's a tool called Android DeBugger, adb to friends.

OK, adb doesn't have friends. It's adb to associates. Associates what likes to give your phone an offer it can't refuse. Folks like Guido and Benny the Bonebreaker.

And me, of course. Adb and I have been associates for years.

In the past, I've used adb to push applications I'm developing onto the phone for testing and playing with. You can also use it to run a Unix style shell inside the phone. (Your Android phone runs a variant of Linux. It really is a computer.) The shell is useful for exploring, until you actually try to access data. Then you hit "Permission Denied" firewalls.

But, adb has a "backup" command, that, per the documentation, backs up your phone and so you can clone it to a new device.

This looked good, so I made a complete backup.

Computer files have different formats. Some are simple text that you can read like a novel--if you like very odd and obscure novels. Other files are databases that you can read with a program like sqlite, the most common database language for phones.

And then there's Android Backup Format. A format that's unique to adb. It's probably a perfectly reasonable format, lots of information for how to restore the backup onto a new phone, but it was pure numeric gibberish to me.

But not to everyone. The web is a marvelous place for finding software that used to work on an older version (or maybe a newer version) of the files than the ones you're dealing with.

But, after a few tries, I found a java package that could convert my adb back up to an ancient Unix format (tar - for Tap Archive and Retrieval). I'm old friends with tar. From there it was a hop, skip, and dump to extract all the backup files and start searching for the messages I wanted.

To my initial dismay, there's not much in this backup. None of my images, no application binaries,

But, several folders deep, under the name that's not listed in the web pages, I found files named things like 000009_mms_backup.txt 000000_sms_backup.txt.

SMS stands for Short Message Service, which is how your phone used to send short, simple text messages. MMS is MultiMedia Message Service: how you send messages with photos and emojis.

There's a pretty good chance that these files had the backups of my conversations.

Oh, frabjous day, they did! And in readable text.

Sort of. It's a list of JSON formatted entries defining sender, receiver, type of message, timestamp and (finally) the text of the message and some sort of key about an attached image.

In three different formats, depending on whether this message was originally sent on my old phone, the new phone, or the new phone after google updated the Messenger app.

There might be a program to reassemble these into coherent conversations, but, to quote the Fantastic Four's "Thing", It's (code) Clobbering Time!

This sort of data extraction is ideal for a Tcl script, and a few hours later, I had the data I wanted in the format I wanted it. A few hours after that, I had *ALL* the data I wanted in a reasonable format. And, a few hours after that, I had a workable program for finding old conversations and displaying them.