Forum Discussion
Can you recover deleted text messages on iPhone 7?
I am trying to retrieve 3 week old text messages , that I have deleted. can this be possible?
The answer is unfortunately: it depends! If you have a backup of the iPhone made before the messages were deleted (either iCloud or made in iTunes on your computer), you can either get the messages out of that backup, or restore the backup to get the messages for sure. Keep in mind that restoring a backup is going to erase the new contents on your iPhone though, so that may not be what you want to do.
If you don't have a backup made before the messages were deleted, there's still a chance that the messages are recoverable. When you delete a message in Messages, the database entry gets tagged for reuse, rather than obliterated - there's a lot of third party tools that will analyze a text message database from an iTunes backup to see if the message record is still there in the database to read. I'm the developer for one of the third party tools - Decipher TextMessage - that will do the analysis on Message app databases in a backup. You can definitely google around to see your options for tools though.
If you are accustomed to backing up your messages to iCloud or iTunes before deleting these messages, just go to them to extract the messages backed up. If not, i think you can use an iphone messages recovery tool to restore the messages quickly.
