Whether you delete your texts after you read them or keep them for posterity, you may find yourself wanting to restore an older one here and there. It’s not unheard of to leave entire conversations on your phone for weeks, months, or even years. Unfortunately, it’s super easy to delete an entire conversation in the Messages app. One swipe and an errant tap, and you could lose everything in the blink of an eye. But if you act fast, you can get them all back. You just need to know what to do.
Prior to iOS 16, you’d actually need to restore your iPhone from a backup to retrieve the message. Thankfully, this isn’t the case anymore, and you can restore deleted messages right within the Messages app. There’s a catch, though. Below, we’ll show you how to restore recently deleted messages with a couple of taps.
The Recently Deleted section in Messages will show all messages you’ve deleted within the past 30 days. All your deleted text messages can be found in the Messages app. To find your trashed messages, open Messages and tap the Edit option at the top left. Then tap Show Recently Deleted. A list of your recent text messages will appear, showing phone numbers or contacts, number of messages and days left until permanent deletion. This will include both entire message threads and individual texts that are deleted. However, you’ll be able to see (and recover) deleted messages only if they’ve been deleted in the last 30 days, so you have to act relatively fast. Also, you can’t see the actual messages themselves, so you’ll have to recover them by recognizing the contact name or phone number. Once they’re recovered, you’ll be able to read the texts. If you want to recover a text message, tap on the thread or message so that it’s selected, hit Recover on the bottom right, and then tap Recover Message in the pop-up that appears. You can also recover all of your deleted text messages at once — don’t select any message and then just tap Recover All. You can also recover all deleted text messages at once. Your recovered messages will appear in sequential order from when they were either sent or received, so you may have to scroll a bit through your existing texts to find them, especially if they’re old and you have a great deal of new messages cluttering up your inbox.