How To Get Old Text Messages On iPhone

Why Is It Possible To Recover Deleted Text Messages From iPhone

Before you recover iPhone deleted text messages, you have to know that after you remove a message from iPhone, the message doesn’t really get deleted. Because the deleted messages is technically marked for deletion by the system and hidden so that they become invisible to us. So deleted messages still stays somewhere on iPhone and you can retrieve them as long as you find those marked and hidden messages files. Thats why you can recover deleted text messages and get them back from your iPhone.

How to find those marked and hidden messages files, and retrieve invisible text messages on iPhone? Actually, there are three ways to retrieve lost or deleted messages of iPhone. If you have a previous backup saved with iTunes or your iCloud, you are able to restore your iPhone text messages from backup. Otherwise, you will need to use a third party iPhone data recovery software or SMS recovery software and restore the deleted message from your iPhone to your computer. Keep reading to learn more about each method.

Back Up Old Messages On Computer

Hopefully one of the methods listed has retrieved old text messages on iPhone. Remember, though, that you should always back up your phone to make sure your messages threads and other files dont vanish anymore.

While you can use the back up the device to cloud or on computer the Apple way, here we introduce the iOS Data Backup & Restore feature integrated in iPhone Data Recovery to help you handle this task. With it, you can select just the types of data you need to back up, and restore it whenever you need. Here’s how to do.

1. Connect your iPhone to computer and launch iPhone Data Recovery software.

2. Click More Tools at the lower left side.

3. In the next opening window, select iOS Data Backup & Restore tab

4. Click Standard backup. Or select Encrypted backup if you want to keep the data secure.

5. Check the boxes next to data types you want to back up.

6. Click Next to initial the backup process.

What’s Next With iPhone Text Message Recovery

Even when deleted, your text messages will most probably live on your phone’s storage device for some time, until overwritten by other data. The best advice here is to try the recovery with Disk Drill as soon as you can, and actually stop using your handset completely until you confirm the message in question is recovered, or is not recoverable at all. The longer you use your iPhone after the deletion occurred, the higher the chances are that part of the storage memory gets overwritten with other data thus driving that text unrecoverable.

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Recover Deleted Messages From Your Other Ios Devices Or Mac

If you’ve deleted a message recently, there’s a good chance it will still be available on a paired macOS or iOS device, such as your laptop or iPad. To check, open the Messages app on your paired devices, and see if the messages are still available here.

If they are, youre in luck. You can take a screenshot of the messages, or copy and paste the text into another location, such as your Notes, to make sure you have a copy of the data.

Once youve done that, you can take a backup of the device that has the messages using iTunes or Finder , which you can then use to recover these messages as a PDF.

How Exactly Does Messages In Icloud Work

it’s pretty easy, but here’s how Messages in iCloud works:

• All of your messages, whether they’re iMessage or SMS, are stored in iCloud using your Apple ID or iCloud account.
• Apple has end-to-end encryption on all of your messages while it’s stored in iCloud, so your data is safe and secure as they get uploaded and downloaded on each device to keep everything synchronized.
• For users who backup their devices with iCloud, this means smaller backups, as Messages are no longer included in the backup due to the implementation of Messages in iCloud.
• When you get a new iPhone, iPad, or Mac, just enable Messages in iCloud on it with your Apple ID, and you’ll get all of your Message history on it, rather than just new messages.

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Restore Deleted iPhone Messages From Itunes Backup

Note

• All iMessages will be replaced by the text messages in the backup after you click Restore Backup. What’s worse, you may lose the current data on your device.
• If you’re not sure whether the iTunes backup file you choose contains the deleted text messages, you can use option 2 from Part 3 which allows you to view your iTunes backup first to prevent you from choosing a wrong backup.

Lookup Old Text Messages On iPhone

You can easily find old messages on iPhone 11/X/8/7/6 without scrolling with the search bar on iMessages.

Tip: Unfortunately, currently, there is no way to search iMessages/text messages by date on iPhone.

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Alternatives To Messages In Icloud

Even though Apple is fairly good about protecting the privacy of their customers, it’s understandable that some people may not feel comfortable with all of their Messages history being stored up in “the cloud.” Fortunately, there is a way to view and manually move your iMessage history and attachments over to a new Mac.

Restore Deleted Messages On iPhone With Icloud Backup

Now you’ll need to erase your iPhone and restore it with the backup that occurred before the deletion to get back the deleted messages. Here’s how:

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How To Turn On Messages In Icloud

Once this is done, ensure that your iPhone is connected to a Wi-Fi network so that your entire Messages history can be uploaded for the initial sync. Apple doesn’t want to drain your battery or cellular data plan doing this, so that’s why you must be on Wi-Fi for the first sync.

After the syncing process , that’s it! All of your Messages history from your iPhone is saved in iCloud with tight end-to-end encryption, and can be accessed on any other device with your Apple ID as long as it’s running iOS 11.4 or later.

But to get this working on your Mac, you’ll need to do the following:

Export Text Messages From iPhone To Computer

Whether you want to copy a conversation or the entire text collection from your iPhone, the free iPhone transfer software – EaseUS MobiMover, will help. It will transfer text messages from your iPhone to your PC, Mac, or laptop and save the texts as an HTML file on the computer, which you can access, view, and print whenever you want to. In addition to messages, this tool also supports photos, videos, contacts, music, ringtones, books, and more. So if you need to transfer more files between iPhone and Mac or PC, you can easily get the job done with this program.

To export text messages from iPhone:

Step 1. Connect your iPhone to your computer and launch EaseUS MobiMover. Tap “Trust” on your iPhone screen to trust this computer. Choose “Phone to PC” and click “Next”.

Step 2. Select the category/categories you’d like to export from iPhone to the computer. Since you want to save iPhone messages to the computer, tick the “Messages” category. You can change the default path C:\Users\Owner\Desktop to other locations. Click “Transfer”.

Step 3. Wait for the transfer process to finish. The messages will be saved as an HTML file on your computer. Thus, you can view the details with a browser whenever you want.

Easy? Follow the simple steps to export your iPhone messages within seconds. Afterward, you can if you need to.

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How To Retrieve Deleted Text Messages On An iPhone

Text messages can sometimes be hard to keep track of, and often vanish under mysterious circumstances, including mistaken deletion, a flawed iOS upgrade, a jailbreak fail, or another unfortunate circumstance. Regardless of how they were lost, though, you can restore missing text messages to your iPhone most of the time.

Thats because your iPhone saves all text message, MMS, and iMessage data in an SQLite database an open-source, back-end utility built into all mobile phones and bundled into many popular apps. This function operates silently, automatically in the background.

When you delete a message, the space gets transformed from allocated to unallocated, while the message data remains intact. Over time, it will be overwritten by new messages flowing in. Before new data overwrites the old data, you can still recover those messages. The first thing to do is to stop messaging until after you retrieve your lost messages.

Depending on how you back up your iPhone with iCloud or directly to your computer there are various methods you can use to recover lost texts, even after an iPhone reset. Third-party apps can also help under certain conditions. Well walk you through the various ways to recover text messages using iOS 13 and 14, which are identical.

Can I Recover The Deleted Text Messages On iPhone Without Computer

Except for restoring from iCloud or iTunes, there’s another way to retrieve text messages on iPhone without computer). If you do not have backups, then the only way to recover deleted messages is to rely on third-party software. For now, there is no totally free iPhone data recovery software, but most of them have free trial versions. Maybe you can try one of them to see if it works for your situation.

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Restore Deleted Texts Using A Third

There are quite a few third-party software tools that promise to let you restore deleted data on your iPhone, including deleted texts. Its a bit of a risktheyre almost never free and theres no guarantee theyll even work. But if youve exhausted all other options, and its really important, it might be worth a shot.

Some of the software options with a good reputation online are PhoneRescue, Wondershare Dr. Fone, and Tenorshare UltData. Much of the time, a deleted message on your iPhone is actually still there in the flash storage, waiting to be overwritten by new data. If thats the case, one of they programs may be able to restore it.

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How To Automatically Delete Old Text Messages On iPhone Android

Is your smartphone taking too long to load the text messaging app? Has the text message app begun stuttering when you scroll up or down the list of messages? Is your phone’s memory almost full and you need to get rid of some of that digital clutter? If your answer to these questions is yes, then you should consider automatically deleting text messages.

Most of us get far too many text messages to manually delete each one of them. On our first Nokia feature phones, we could only store 100-odd messages in most phones, so we kept a close eye on all incoming messages. Today though, storage restrictions have seemingly vanished and the messages began piling up in everyone’s phones. That led to another set of problems – laggy messaging apps and storage woes. Reducing the clutter is actually pretty simple – you can set your phone to automatically delete old messages. This is how.

iPhone

On the iPhone, you can set the device to automatically delete all old messages. The only problem is that you can’t make any exceptions – you can’t change a setting that would allow all messages from a particular sender to stay even past the expiry date. If you want to save any information from a message, we suggest keeping a clipping in an app like Evernote. To set up automatically cleaning old messages, this is what you do:

Android

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Recover Deleted Messages From Itunes/finder Backup

If you are sure that the iTunes backup contains the messages that youve lost or deleted, this could be another way to retrieve deleted text messages on your iPhone. But restore will erase the contents on your iPhone and then put all data from the backup to your device. Not only the messages but also the photos, contacts, and everything will be restored from the iPhone backup to your device. Please turn off Find My iPhone before the restoration.

If you are not sure whether the iTunes backup contains the deleted SMS or iMessage, you can use some top best iPhone backup viewers to have a look at the content in the backup files.

1. On Windows PC and macOS Mojave and earlier

On the Windows PC or macOS Mojave and earlier you can use iTunes to restore iPhone messages:

Step 1. Run iTunes and connect the iPhone to the computer.

Step 2. Click Summary and click Restore Backup.

Restore iPhone Messages from iTunes Backup

Step 3. Choose a backup and click Restore to start.

Select iPhone backups to restore your deleted messages

Step 4. Click Restore to restore iPhone messages.

Erase iPhone to Restore Messages from iTunes

2. On macOS Catalina and later

You can use Finder to restore your iPhone deleted messages on macOS Catalina and later:

Restore iPhone Messages with Finder

Case 3 When You Have No Backup And The Deleted Text Messages Are Replaced

In this case, you can only ask help from your cellular carrier. There are chances that your deleted text messages are stored on their server.

To prevent this kind of dilemma, you need to:

This quick solution may fail because the deletion maybe have been sycned to iCloud already. Then you can choose from the following solutions according to your situation.

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Retrieve Old Texts Using Messages In Icloud

Well, if you’re lucky, this is a super simple way to get back your old messages. If you have another iDevice using the same Apple ID, check it and see if your old iMessages and SMS messages still lie on there.

Turning on Messages in Cloud option helps you sync your texts across all of your devices. At the same time, you can remove old message threads from iPhone, but keep the full history on your other devices as long as you turn off the feature on those devices before deleting the old message.

To recover old text threads from your another Apple device to iPhone:

1. Open the Settings app on that device, iPad for example.

2. Tap Apple ID, iCloud, iTunes & App Store.

3. Tap iCloud.

4. Scroll down to Messages and toggle the switch to ON.

5. Wait for the sync to run. Uploading your old texts to iCloud takes a few time to complete, so you have to stay signed-in to your iCloud account the whole time.

6. Repeat the same steps to turn off Messages in iCloud on your iPhone. When a notification pops up, select Disable and Download Messages.

7. Turn the switch to ON position again.

Leave your iPhone plugged in to power and connected to Wi-Fi. All messages should be back and appeared on the Messages app soon.

This method may not work for everyone, but if it does, you will have saved a lot of time.