Recover Text Messages

Recover Text Messages: a reader asked…

Help! My iPhone seems to have lost some of my most important text message conversations! I have it set to keep them forever, but some have gone missing. How can I get them back? I do have iCloud backup set to run daily, but the erase-and-restore-from-a-backup procedure sounds daunting. Is there an easier way?

Yes there is! You don’t need to do a full iPhone erase-and-restore procedure because Apple thoughtfully put in a method to easily recover recently deleted messages using the iMessage app & service. That’s great because a full iPhone erase-and-restore procedure only restores your iPhone to the latest iCloud backup, and that might not have messages from a few days ago, especially if you backed up last night.

The restoration process is pretty easy, open the Messages app on your iPhone and tap the ‘Edit’ link at the top-left of the screen. The last entry in the resulting menu says ‘Show Recently Deleted’ – tap that and you’ll see the text conversations that have been deleted recently from your Messages app. Tap one or more to select it/them, and then tap the ‘Recover’ link at the bottom. If you have more than a few conversations that show up, you may have to scroll down to see the ‘Recover’ link, and if you haven’t selected any, it will say ‘Recover All’.

Once you tap that link, you’ll be returned to your list of message conversations. You’ll see the items you selected and recovered are back, voila! Depending on the date of the latest message in a conversation, the conversation(s) you recently recovered may not be at the top of the list, and you might have to scroll down to see them, but they’ll be there.

So you may be wondering why this happened, and I have a guess: Your smartphone has an edge-to-edge display, and it’s easy to make mistakes tapping and swiping, also easy to forget to lock the screen before you put it in your pocket or purse. So many millions of us have butt-dialed people accidentally that it has become a meme. Many other functions and operations also happen accidentally, including deleting things from your iPhone. The best way to prevent this is to make sure your iPhone is locked before you put it away and avoid touching the screen except when you’re tapping or swiping.