It's also worth considering that microSD cards are a lot less reliable than the internal storage and wear out faster, so while they are fine for media (written once, read occasionally) they are not a good choice for apps' internal databases or caches (frequently, even constantly, updated, so write cycles). Actually come to think of it fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, so a 5GB message database would be a problem too - the internal storage, which uses the ext4 filesystem, is definitely better for storing large databases. I'm not privy to the reasons behind the choices, but privacy is probably one consideration: you don't want every app to be able to read your messages, and data stored on microSD are not secure (most microSD cards use fat32 filesystems, which don't even support access control lists). MMS generally have a size limit anyway, but my rule of thumb would be that any containing videos will almost certainly be larger than any others, and it will be MMS rather than SMS that are using the space (I barely use MMS, and my most recent SMS/MMS backup of > 10k messages is 11MB, so 5GB is either 4-5 million SMS or else it's MMS that are the culprits - and a lot of them even so). Sorting by size would have to be a feature of the particular message app. I've not heard of anyone do that, but in principle it could work. (*) OK, in principle if you were rooted and know your linux you could move the database to SD and put a soft link in its original location to the new one. Whether you can view the backup will depend on what app you make the backup with: there is no standard, so each will use its own format.īut as for what you are really wanting, to tell Android to move the SMS/MMS database to SD and then carry on as before, I'm sorry but that's not possible(*). If you can find an app that lets you view the backup (either on Android or a computer) then you could back up, save the backup wherever you like and then delete the threads or messages you don't need to read in your message app.
You can of course make backups with one of the myriad SMS backup tools.
If you don't have root you can't see, copy or move that file anyway. If you had root access you could copy it to SD, but the message system would still use the copy in /data/data and if you removed that no SMS/MMS app would be able to see your messages. The Android message database (which is common to all SMS/MMS apps) lives in /data/data and you can't reassign its location. The short answer is that if you still want to be able to view them in your message app (Textra I assume) you can't. 5GB? Presumably a lot of these are MMS, because I can't imagine how anyone could amass 5GB of SMS.
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