I'm attempting to restore my iPhone 3.0 and set it up as a new phone without doing a full restore from my backup, but want to keep my SMS messages.

Before 3.0 I would just delete almost everything in the backup folder except the 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mdata and then restore from this very small backup with just SMS messages. However this doesn't appear to work with 3.0 and the messages do not get restored. Any idea what files i need to leave in the restore folder to restore just the messages.

Thanks

This may be like 3 years late, but you can use something like iPhone Backup Extractor now to determine the specific filename and recover the actual SMS.db file.