Mobile phone messages

[freddytin]

A quick question for the mobile savvy amongst us.

Is it possible to request a transcript of all my text messages from Orange over the last few months ?
I'm not even sure that records of texts are kept at all, though I have heard that all videos and pics are retained for some time.
If somebody has an answer please, it could well help me out of a sticky situation.

[maxed]

And your sticky situation is ???

[miniandy]

No. They are stored on the network for the period that it takes to send, and then they are deleted. It would cost too much in storage to store all texts that are sent over the network.

[m1spw]

One of the guys who is working on a house my dad is doing up have lots of pictures and videos of his girlfriend on his mobile. when he upgraded to a new phone just after xmas he forgot to delete them from the phone before he handed it over to the orange shop

Sorry, that was slightly off topic, but as for your question I very much doubt they will be stored. Someone may be able to recover them from your phone though - isn't anything saved to a storage device kept as a ghost file or something?

[freddytin]

maxed said:

And your sticky situation is ???

Ahh, shall we say it's of the domestic variety, not mine I might add and yes I am totally innocent on all counts.

[mph999]

Hmm, I work for a different mobile firm and there is a legal obligation to keep certain data. You will find that voice/gprs data is included.

We certainly keep this data (I recently recovered a shed load for legal reasons), and I know we can go back several years.

Unsure if you will get the content, but you will almost certainly get who they were sent to. However, if Orange will recover/provide this for you is another matter.

M

[mph999]

m1spw said:

One of the guys who is working on a house my dad is doing up have lots of Sorry, that was slightly off topic, but as for your question I very much doubt they will be stored. Someone may be able to recover them from your phone though - isn't anything saved to a storage device kept as a ghost file or something?

Kinda true, anthing stored certainly on disk can usually be recovered, even if deleted. Using specialist techniques, files, or parts of can be "recreated". Even if written over several times, at a low level the surface of the disk may yield what was there.

Degaussing properly tends to make this a lot harder, if not impossible.

M