Re: Recovering text messages

> GUEST wrote:
> I had saved years of text messages on Google Voice. The external hard disk crashed, and those items " stupidly saved as Stuffit files " were toast. The only files that weren’t recovered were the stuffit files, so bye-bye stuffit!
> 
> The material vitally important. Does anyone know how to contact the right department at Sprint to get ahold of those messages?
> 
> Thanks,
> Zalel



If those were Google Voice texts, Sprint was never the thing storing them in the first place. Sprint would only have been carrying regular SMS for your Sprint number, and even then carriers generally keep billing level metadata a lot longer than they keep the actual message contents. If you're talking about years old message bodies, the odds are basically zero that a carrier can hand you the full text of them unless there was some very specific legal preservation at the time.

If the messages were in Google Voice, your best shot is Google's side, not Sprint. If the Google Voice account still exists and the messages were not deleted, they're often still sitting there and you can export your Voice data. If they were deleted back then, that's usually the end of it.

Also Sprint as a separate place to call is kind of gone now, it's all under T Mobile. If you try anyway, you'd be dealing with T Mobile privacy or legal compliance, and even then you're likely to get records of dates and numbers, not the content.

So I'd start by logging into the Google account that owned the Voice number and seeing what's still in the Voice web UI. If it's there, export it and you're done. If it's not there, Sprint is very unlikely to be able to recreate it for you. 


This is a response to the post seen at:
http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=402559810#402559810