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A friend borrowed my microSD card to take some pictures and ended up deleting the android directories. I assumed that text messages were stored on this card. No message history appeared after the card was removed. incoming messages from old contacts started new threads. contacts and everything else stayed.

I want to find the year's worth of old text messages.

I've recovered some files using photorec (mostly pictures and audio from my phone). The only non-obvious files are a 10MB .elf file and a 72KB .SQLITE file. the directory structure is not preserved, so all files appear in one directory.

does this approach make sense? what file extension am I looking for? how do I read the database that texts are stored in?

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  • possible duplicate of Where on the file system are SMS messages stored? – wbogacz Dec 22 '13 at 3:28
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    In a sense. They are usually not stored on your SDCard – unless you did some tricky things with DirectoryBind, Link2SD, and the like. Did you? – Izzy♦ Dec 22 '13 at 10:57
  • Try to examine the .sqlite file. It could be the database containing the SMS, although that's not typical as @Izzy already mentioned. – Flow Dec 25 '13 at 15:23
  • It would also help to know the complete name of the .sqlite file to determine whether it's really related (which I massively doubt). The .elf file you can ignore, that's a so-called ELF binary, and doesn't hold any of your personal data. – Izzy♦ Dec 26 '13 at 13:57

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