One of the best tips you can keep in mind when using your smartphone is to remember to back up your data. Whether you’re preparing to move to a new device or just want to keep a safe copy of your important stuff somewhere, Backup has you covered. Last fall, we looked at Google’s efforts to build a new backup feature into Messages, and today we’ve got some updates on how to implement it.

Currently, Messages still doesn’t offer its own backup solution. When you create a phone backup using Google One, you can choose to back up SMS and MMS messages as part of Other Device Data, but Messages itself doesn’t let you do this directly. Google seems very interested in changing this, though, and when we dug into its ongoing work in November, we discovered a pretty fleshed-out interface for introducing and managing backup settings in Messages:

While Google hasn’t publicly enabled this feature yet, we’ve been keeping an eye on further developments and have now discovered that Google is considering adding a storage section to Messages to back up settings.

This screen looks a little glitchy in the form we’re able to trigger today, but once all the required connections are in place, this screen should reflect the current state of your Google storage, just like we do in the account switcher in apps like Gmail As seen.

In an age when text messages are essentially just text, the idea of ​​even considering the impact of backups on storage limits might feel a little silly. Even a mountain of text is only a few megabytes. But with the advent of RCS, which enables embedding high-quality images and videos in our messages, it will soon be easy to see how storage threats become a very real problem.

We still don’t know when Google will finally roll out the tool, but development looks to be ready.