How to Backup Your Android Phone Logs and SMS to Google Drive Spreadsheets

Your Android smartphone only stores the last 30 days of phone calls made or received. Your text messages are also a mess after a point, especially with contacts you talk to often. If you want to keep this data safely backed up, the new IFTTT for Android will automatically store them forever in your Google Drive.
Of course, Titanium Backup is still the best backup solution for your Android smartphone, but remember that’s paid and only for rooted phones. Plus, it only keeps the data safely and doesn’t turn it into an easily searchable spreadsheet.

With the launch of IFTTT for Android, some users are already suggesting unusual automated recipes for the app. The folks at I Love Free Software came up with the idea of backing up phone logs, and we decided to take it further and back up our text messages while at it.

How To Backup Phone Logs

The process to backup your phone logs is pretty simple. Fire up the IFTTT for Android app and create a new recipe. To backup all your phone logs, we will be creating three different recipes—one for missed calls, another for received calls, and the third for calls you place.

 

1. Tap the channel for “IF”. Scroll to select “Android Phone Call” and tap the blue plus sign next to “Any phone call placed”.
2. Tap the channel for “Then”. Scroll to select “Google Drive” and tap the blue plus sign next to “Add row to spreadsheet”.
3. Choose whether you want to receive notifications or not when the recipe runs and hit Finish.

That’s it. Now every time you make a phone call from your Android smartphone, it will be automatically backed up as a row in a spreadsheet file in your Google Drive, which looks something like this:



As you can see, it logs the date and time, the phone number (blurred in above image), the contact, and the duration of the call. In the recipe’s settings, you can change these elements or their order.
Using the same method, you can also create new spreadsheets for phone calls answered and phone calls missed, selecting those in the first step.
Note that this only backs up the call logs and does not record the phone call itself. You need a different method to automatically record calls and never run out of space.

How To Backup Text Messages

Backing up your SMS is similar to how you backup phone logs.

1.  Tap the channel for “IF”. Scroll to select “Android SMS” and tap the blue plus sign next to “Any new SMS received”.
2. Tap the channel for “Then”. Scroll to select “Google Drive” and tap the blue plus sign next to “Add row to spreadsheet”.
3. Choose whether you want to receive notifications or not when the recipe runs and hit Finish.

And just like that, a new spreadsheet will be created for all the SMSes you get from now on. Note that it does not work with MMS media. In total, you will get five different spreadsheets—three for calls (answered, placed, missed) and two for text messages (received, sent).



This method does not cover older messages, but we have a workaround for that. Download and install SMS Backup & Restore from the Play Store, run it and follow the instructions to create a backup. Once that is done, you will find an option to export the backup as a CSV file. This CSV file can be opened in any spreadsheet app. Just copy and paste it into a Google Drive spreadsheet and you’re done!

Share Your IFTTT For Android Recipes

When it comes to the web, the ultimate IFTTT guide covers most scenarios you will need. But the automation app is new to Android and people are still discovering its many potentials. So if you have some cool IFTTT for Android recipe, share it in the comments below!