Recover Deleted Messages On Your iPhone

Apple Bytes: 

We’ve all been there, accidentally deleting files we didn’t mean to erase. In almost every case, there are ways to recover that lost data. When it comes to the iPhone, Apple built features into iOS features that let you recover deleted messages, voicemails, photos, or iCloud Drive files.

How to delete messages on iPhone

Before explaining how to recover deleted messages on iPhone, let's review the deletion process. If you’re just learning how to manage the iPhone and iOS, you should be aware of these gestures for a few simple reasons.

It’s important to avoid unintentionally deleting a message in the first place. That way, you won’t worry about recovering it. But, you also need to realize that you've deleted the message. This will increase your chances of recovering an accidentally deleted iPhone message.

You can do one of two things to delete an SMS or iMessage thread from the Messages app on iPhone. Tap on a message and slide your finger to the left. Either tap the Trash icon when it shows up, or keep swiping to the left to delete the message.

The other option is pressing and holding your finger on a message thread. Then select the Delete option. As you can see, the accidental swipe to the left might lead to unintentional message deletion. Or you might swipe on the wrong message to delete.

Also, you can delete independent messages from a chat. To do it, go into a conversation, press and hold anywhere on the screen, and choose the More option. Then manually select the message to delete. However, you can accidentally select more messages than you intended using this deletion process.

How to recover deleted messages on iPhone

It’s important to realize you’ve accidentally deleted an iPhone message as soon as it happens. That’s because iOS doesn’t remove it completely from the iPhone storage. Instead, it places the message in a Trash folder, giving you 30 days to recover it.

The sooner you realize you’ve deleted the message, the better. You’ll be able to recover the deleted message following these steps:

Load the Messages app
Tap the Edit button
Select the Show Recently Deleted
Select the messages you want to recover
Tap the Recover button to retrieve the deleted iPhone message

Conversely, you can use this procedure to delete text messages from your iPhone permanently. Similar methods are available for voicemails, photos and videos, and iCloud files.

Don’t forget about iPhone backups

The best way to save messages is by backing up the iPhone. Frequent backups will increase the chances of recovering accidentally deleted messages from the iPhone. Especially if you’ve exceeded that 30-day limit mentioned above.

But even with frequent iPhone backups, you need to ensure you have enough storage to save the different backups. You’ll have to hunt for older backups that still contain the message data you deleted. Or that you have the messages still in the trash files so you can recover them.

The obvious downside of this avenue is that you’ll have to go through a restore process, which could lead to additional data loss. You’d be restoring the entire iOS installation on iPhone, not just the Messages app. The older the backup you restore, the more recent data you’ll lose from other apps.

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Some iPhone Text Message Tips

Text messaging has evolved a lot since the first message was sent in December 1992.

United States mobile users sent around 2 trillion text messages in 2021, according to the website Statista. This is a significant increase from the 81 billion sent in 2005.

Decades of texting have seen emoticons made from colon and parenthesis replaced by more obvious and emotive emojis. Now, typos can be edited or entire messages unsent, and you can respond to a message without typing anything.

It's also not uncommon to meet someone who prefers to communicate via text instead of phone or email. But there is so much more to these digital interactions than just sending some text.

How to add effects on iMessage

iMessage has built-in effects that can add some extra pizazz when messaging between Apple devices. To find these effects, press and hold the blue arrow that sends the message. Then the options appear. Effects include: Balloons, Confetti, Lasers, Echo, and Invisible ink.

Either the blue bubble or the entire screen will be animated depending on the effect you choose. Animations appear automatically when sending a message that says “Happy birthday,” “Congratulations” or “Happy New Year.”

How to react or reply to a text?

Whether you’re in a group text or carrying on multiple conversations in one message, things can get confusing. Android and Apple devices allow users to reply to a specific message. This creates a thread and attaches the related conversations to one another, making it much easier to follow the conversations.

To reply on Apple or Android devices, double-tap or long press on the message and the ‘reply’ option should appear. Type your message, then hit send. This only works when you’re messaging from one Apple device to another Apple device or from an Android to another Android.

If you’d rather reply without words, ‘reacting’ to a message is the way to go. To react to a message, double-tap or long-press the message and select the preferred option.

How do I edit an iMessage?

To edit a text message: Hard press on the message bubble you want to edit; Tap ‘edit’; Make the changes you want; Press the check mark to save the changes.

Edits can only be made within 15 minutes of sending the message. Unsending a message is very similar to editing one, but this can only be done within two minutes of sending. 

To unsend a message: Hard press on the message bubble; Select “unsend” from the dropdown menu. However, this feature only works if both devices are opening on iOS16 or higher.

Credit: usatoday.com