How to recover deleted text messages on iPhone

Text messages have a reputation for being informal and inconsequential, but they can contain very important information! If you delete messages to clear up space on your iPhone and accidentally delete an important text, there is still hope of getting it back!

There are three potential ways to recover deleted text messages: you can restore your iPhone to a time before the messages were deleted, you can contact your phone provider, and you can use a third-party app. Below is a brief description of all three options.

This is probably the easiest and fastest way to recover lost text. If you had an iCloud backup before you deleted the text, you should be able to restore it by restoring your phone to that iCloud backup.

Open Settings, click the Apple ID card at the top, and select iCloud > Manage Storage > Backups. You'll see a list of your device's backups and can tap the iPhone's backup list to see when it was last backed up.

If you don't want to rely on automatic iCloud backups, or don't have enough iCloud storage for them, you can use iTunes (or Finder in macOS Catalina or later) to back up your iPhone to your PC or Mac. Like the previous iCloud method, this requires backing up before deleting messages, then resetting the phone to restore from that backup. You will lose everything after backing up.

Connect your iPhone to the PC or Mac you backed up. On your PC (or Mac with an older version of macOS), launch iTunes. On a Mac with macOS Catalina or later, open Finder. In iTunes, click the iPhone icon in the upper left corner. On a Mac running macOS Catalina or later, select your device from the Finder's left menu bar.

Your cell phone provider may keep a record of the text messages you send, at least for a while. If you deleted a very important text message, you might be able to call your carrier to get a copy.

Please note that this only applies to SMS text messages (green bubble conversations), not iMessages (blue bubble conversations). Each iMessage is encrypted on your device and not decrypted before reaching the recipient, so your carrier won't be able to keep a record of them.

In order to get text message records from your carrier, you may need to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove your identity and even get permission from the other party you're texting. And most carriers only keep records of SMS messages for a limited time—you can't recover messages from a year ago.

There are many third-party software tools that promise to allow you to recover deleted data on your iPhone, including deleted texts. This is a bit risky - they're almost never free, and there's no guarantee they'll even work. But if you've exhausted all other options and it's really important, it might be worth a try.