SIM Info

[Butler]

I believe that you can retrieve even deleted information from a SIM card. How many deleted SMS messages are stored on a SIM. I appreciate that this depends on the size of each one but I have been told theat every message ever sent is stored on them but I find this difficult to believe???

[Alex Railean]

The number of stored SMSes depends on the size of the SIM.

Just like deleted files on a hard drive, messages are not deleted, but marked as deleted. This means that they're actually there, but they will be overwritten by new ones whenever you run out of free space.

You cannot restore deleted contacts though, a SIM card won't allow that.

One of the future releases of SIM Manager will come with SMS management and SMS recovery tools.

[Alex Railean]

every message ever sent is stored
That is incorrect. A simple explanation is that the SIM card does not have an infinite capacity. Moreover, SIM cards are usually small in size, 16 KB, 32, maybe 64 KB. The space is used for other things too, not only SMS, so this makes it impossible to store all the messages you've ever sent.

[Butler]

Can you tell me when this release is likely to be?

Also could you advise of the approximate number of texts on a standard SIM that are likely to be stored? Is it likely to be 10, 100 or 1000???

Many thanks

Butler

[Alex Railean]

Judging by the results of our experiments, in the 'worst' case a SIM card can hold up to 10 SMS, and in the 'best' case you get at most 30 messages on a card.

Your mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure that 'thousands' of messages is a very unlikely scenario. If you've seen phones with a lot of messages in them, then they were certainly stored in the phone's memory, not on the SIM.


The date of release is not defined; we are now working on an API which has this functionality, then we will have to re-write SIM Manager so that it uses the new API. The API itself is pretty close to being releases, but migrating SIM Manager to the new platform will take a while.

[cingular employee]

Here is the situation more times than I like to imagine. Customer- "I changed phones and needed my numbers from the other phone. I accidentally chose overwrite instead of merge to sim from the menu. How can I get the overwritten contacts back?" I've read that there is limited space on the sim, so if there are no other contacts added to the sim, is there a method to take back the overwrite and reveal the last information if it hasn't been overwritten with information instead of blank space?

[Alex Railean]

Unfortunately that's not possible. When a contact is deleted, that memory area is cleared. So you can't recover deleted contacts.

If they wrote other contacts in the same memory - then there's clearly nothing to be recovered.

Which tools did they use to edit the SIM? Perhaps that program keeps a log, or creates backups in the background? If so, then this is the only way.

[Unregistered]

Kay, when I turn on my phone it says; !Disabled Sim ...I didn't quite know what that meant so I took out my Sim card and put it back in again, now it says; !Insert Sim ...even though my sim card is already in, what do I do?

[Alex Railean]

Does another SIM work correctly in the phone?
Does your SIM work correctly in other phones?