Parsing “date” field of iPhone SMS file from backup

Question

While this isn\'t a programming question per se, it IS related.

So I\'m trying to figure out how to parse the SMS DB that gets backed up from the iPhone. I\'m looking at

Answer 1

Since the backup is exported to SQLite database format, here's how to convert the number to a real date in SQLite:

select
    datetime(date + strftime('%s', '2001-01-01 00:00:00'),
       'unixepoch', 'localtime') as date,
    *
from message

Answer 2

It is in seconds since 1/1/2001 instead of the others which are Unix based off of 1/1/1970. So to convert it to say an Excel time your formula would be =Cell/(60*60*24) + "1/1/2001".

Answer 3

Fomurla with time of messages: =Cell/(60*60*24) + "1/1/2001 7:00"

Answer 4

There may be another answer.

=Cell/(60*60*24) + "1/1/1970"

works with my current version of the iPhone/iOS => 4.3.3

Answer 5

I don't know about getting the correct date given two versions present, but when I did this today, I noticed the date column was not the standard unix time but a longer number with seemingly nine zeros at the end, like 444548608000000000. This is what I did to get the correct date:

select
    datetime(substr(date, 1, 9) + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') as f_date,
    text
from message

Answer 6

Bohemian♦ is right, but there's a little typo in his answer:

use %S (capitals) instead of %s, since the time is represented in seconds since 2001 and not 1970!

Doc from https://www.sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html

%s      seconds since 1970-01-01
%S      seconds: 00-59

select datetime(date + strftime('%S', '2001-01-01 00:00:00'), 'unixepoch', 'localtime') as date, * from message