The backup service for the #Nokia #Lumia phones should allow any previous SMS messages you have sent to be backedup to a “cloud”.
The idea being that you will get them flood into your phone with little or no intervention when you move windows phones and / or reset your phone.
My experience of this has always been fairly poor. I have had to reset and change my phone a few times. A broken screen, a software issue, a need to refresh due to slowness and more recently a need to replace my phone.
Each time i have had to use the SMS restore feature it has never worked.
My SMS messages come through in a real mixed bag. Some come through fine “John Kendrick”, some come through as numbers “+4478579908761” but most come through as “Kendrick; John Kendrick”.
The first two are fine. They either mean the contact has come through or been matched to a contact on my phone. The latter is a major problem.
I order, or should I now say, used to order my contacts via surname first name and used to display them in the same manner. I am pretty sure that doing this causes an issue in the backup service.
I am pretty confident that the backup service cant backup correctly if you use that display sequence.
I recently swapped phones and spent an evening trying to fix this. Then, after failing to, got on to Nokia. Nokia kept asking me to reset my phone. Wasn’t helpful.
One thing i did do is purposefully change the display and ordering to first name first. Sent a few texts. Backed up and then reset my phone.
When the text came through, the surname issue still existed, BUT the more recent texts came through ok.
Unfortunately the older texts still have this problem, but going forward i should be able to use the backup properly by only using the standard / default display for contacts.
First name display order, first name storage order.
Pretty rubbish really. I am sure this bug has been there for well over a year…