Have you ever cleaned up your texts only to delete something you wanted to keep? It happens to all of us eventually, but iPhone users have the ability to restore text messages before they disappear forever.
Before iOS 16, you had to restore your iPhone from a backup to recover the message. This is no longer the case and you can restore deleted messages directly in the Messages app. There is, however, a catch.
Below we will show you how to restore recently deleted messages in just a few clicks.
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Locate your deleted text messages
The Recently Deleted section in Messages will show all the messages you deleted in the last 30 days.
All your deleted text messages can be found in the Messages app. To find your deleted messages, open Messages and tap the icon To modify option at the top left. Then press Show recently deleted files.
A list of your recent text messages will appear, displaying phone or contact numbers, number of messages, and days remaining until permanent deletion. This will include both entire message threads and individual deleted texts. However, you will only be able to see (and recover) deleted messages if they were deleted within the last 30 days, so you need to act relatively quickly.
Additionally, you can’t see the messages themselves, so you’ll have to retrieve them by recognizing the contact’s name or phone number. Once recovered, you will be able to read the texts.
Recover the messages you want to restore
If you want to retrieve a text message, tap the thread or message to make it selected, tap To recover at the bottom right, then tap Retrieve message in the pop-up window that appears. You can also recover all your deleted text messages at once: don’t select any messages, then just tap Recover everything.
You can also recover all deleted text messages at once.
Your retrieved messages will appear in sequential order from when they were sent or received, so you may have to scroll through your existing texts to find them, especially if they are old and have lots of new messages cluttering your inbox.
To learn more, learn how to opt out of Google’s Find My Device network (and why you might want to do it).
