How to Recover Deleted IPhone Messages?
It happens to the best of us. You take care of your day by tapping on your smartphone while traveling through your little slice of the world. Before you know it, you know you’ve accidentally done something on your device that you didn’t intend to do – at least that’s the scenario I’m submitting for posting this week in the 911 Lifehacker tech support column.
I’ll let Lifehacker reader Marie explain:
“I read one of your articles on the Internet, at the end of which it is suggested to write to you if we still have questions … I accidentally deleted the conversation on iPhone Message and follow many tips on the Internet to restore the backup, this conversation existed. the message thread still doesn’t appear. What gives?”
The good news is that you’ve already tried a lot of techniques, so I’ll be brief. Bad news? I’m not sure how much more magic you can summon to recover missing iPhone messages.
Generally speaking, when you delete messages or conversations on your iPhone, that’s it. On iOS, you won’t find a “recently deleted” section for messages, nor any trash can with a large Apple logo printed on the site. As soon as he was gone, he was gone.
However, if you’ve synced your messages to iCloud – like most others – then your old story is probably still available on another of your Apple devices, if possible. For example, start your MacBook, make sure it is not connected to the Internet, and you should be able to open the conversation (or message) and save it as a PDF (by “printing”) at least. You can also view (and copy) your conversations directly from Finder if you go to this folder: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/Archive
While you can also try the “restore from an older backup” option, I’m not sure if this method will work because it’s unclear how Apple prioritizes inconsistencies in iCloud data. For example, if the conversation you deleted was critical and you were rolled back to a device backup from the moment it was deleted, I’m not sure if your device’s messages will override what already exists in iCloud. If anything, your iCloud synced messages will replace anything on your device.
If you’re using an iPad, you can use a (paid) program like iExplorer to export your messages before iCloud syncs your deletions.
Of course, this is a moot point if you don’t sync your messages to iCloud. In this case, restoring from an earlier backup should resurrect what you deleted.
In an ideal world, Apple would let you decide what to sync (and which direction to go). Or at least give you a little window to restore what you accidentally smashed. I would still stick with iCloud, even with your scenario in mind, but be much more careful with swiping and tapping in the future. At least until the best solutions for content recovery emerge.