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Is it possible to access old log files,lets say 3 months old, to see the usage on the android device, by usage i mean, any app installed or unistalled, time spent online, via wifi or cellular, time offline, times switched on and switched off,apps used and any other usage data.

Is this possible through the ADB on windows? I want to be able to connect the tablet to my PC and access all the logs for the last 3 months, currently am just getting the current date only, i cannot even get logs for yesterday. The command am using is adb logcat > currentdevicelog.txt Any help would be highly appreciated, the version of android on the device is Nougat-7.0

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Android does not store the output of logcat in flash memory. Instead logcat uses a ring buffer in RAM of usually 64KB up to 4MB (depends on what is configured). RAM is much faster than flash memory and also flash may fail earlier if constantly logmessages are written onto it.

A ringbuffer means that if the buffer is full the oldest entry will be overwritten by a new entry. Therefore logcat usually only contains the last minutes or hours. And only log messages after the last reboot as the logcat buffer is not saved on shutdown and the RAM memory is also lost on reboot.

Therefore there are no old log messages you can access.

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  • there is no logs stored on the internal memory other than the RAM?
    – indago
    Jun 17, 2019 at 8:35
  • Only some kernel messages are usually stored in case the kernel crashes. As I wrote persistent logs are not designated by Android as this could reduce the flash memory life time and it costs more battery.
    – Robert
    Jun 17, 2019 at 8:51

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