Programmatically backup android call log and SMS without root privilege

Question

I simply want to backup SMS messages and call log of my own android, programmatically (I want to integrate this as part of a larger backup script). There is a user app called "SMS Backup and Restore" which is able to do this. (How can I make an app run from the usb interface?)

When I try,

adb shell sqlite > dump

I get permission denied. Every other attempt to read the database to access these logs, which I understand is in

data/data/com.sec.android.provider.logsprovider/databases/logs.db

is met with permission denied.

What I read is that the only way to address this permission issue is to root the device, which I do not want to do at the moment.

Is there a way to do this through adb? I don't mind eventually writing an app if I have to, but I want to know if there is a simpler way.

Answer 1

You have to be rooted to access the /data/data directory. Without root, you could write a program to iterate through the MMS-SMS content provider and dump the results into your own database (that you can export/do whatever you want with).

Example of such:

try{
    Uri uri = Uri.parse("content://sms");
    ContentResolver contentResolver = getContentResolver();
    Cursor SMSL = contentResolver.query(uri, null, null, null, "date asc");
    while (SMSL.moveToNext()) {
        long dateTimeMillis = SMSL.getLong(SMSL.getColumnIndex("date"));
        Integer id1 = SMSL.getInt(SMSL.getColumnIndex("_id"));
        String body = SMSL.getString(SMSL.getColumnIndex("body"));
        Integer type1 = SMSL.getInt(SMSL.getColumnIndex("type"));
        String address = SMSL.getString(SMSL.getColumnIndex("address"));
        String read = SMSL.getString(SMSL.getColumnIndex("read"));
        String seen = SMSL.getString(SMSL.getColumnIndex("seen"));

              //Do whatever with the data here 

        SMSL.close();   
        }       

        } catch (Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
    }