For a long time, I’ve known that the iPhone stores its text messages as a SQLite database. This matters a lot to me, because I have thousands of text messages, since our server monitoring pages me whenever anything fails, and a bad failure means hundreds of texts at once. It’s to the point where it feels slow loading them now.

In theory, this should be a simple query. In reality, the iPhone is locked down so that there’s no way to get to that file unless you jailbreak your iPhone.

Today, I had one of those days when I did a lot of stuff, and feel like I learned a lot, but I’m back where I started. This great post talks more about the SMS database and its table structure, from someone having the exact same problem I am. Unfortunately, they’ve jailbroken their iPhone, and I have not.

What I think might have potential is recovery mode. I’ve seen a few references to how recovery mode allows unfettered access to the iPhone’s filesystem. It’s pretty easy to enter recovery mode, but I got nowhere: Linux didn’t seem to want to find any filesystems. (Maybe the iPhone is HFS?) “lsusb” showed an Apple device, but that’s as far as I got.

The good news is that recovery mode is easy to exit out of. There are some people saying you need complicated programs to get out of it. Nonsense. Power the phone off, and then power it back on. Viola.

So sadly, I can’t confirm whether or not recovery mode actually gives full filesystem access. I’m growing more and more tempted to jailbreak my iPhone, but I’m so dependent on it that I’m not sure I’m willing to take the risk.