Accidentally Deleted a Text Message on Your iPhone? Here’s How to Recover It

It’s easy to make a mistake on your iPhone and accidentally delete a text message in the Messages app, but that mistake can turn into a terror if the message contains critical information that you don’t want to lose. Don’t worry: as long as you act within a reasonable time frame, you can recover that deleted message.

Before iOS 16, you had to restore your iPhone from a backup to recover the message. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case and you can restore deleted messages directly in the Messages app. There’s a catch, though.

Below we’ll show you how to restore recently deleted messages in just a few clicks.

For more, check out the iPhone settings you should change for a better night’s sleep and the 7 new Android features announced in May 2024.

Locate your deleted text messages

All your deleted text messages are located in the Messages app. To find your deleted messages, open Messages and tap the To modify option at the top left. Then press Show recently deleted items.

A list of your recent text messages will appear, showing phone numbers or contacts, the number of messages, and the days remaining before permanent deletion. This will include both entire message threads and individual text messages that have been deleted. However, you will only be able to see (and recover) deleted messages if they were deleted within the last 30 days, so you will 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 retrieved, you’ll 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 so that it is selected, tap To recover bottom right, then press Retrieve the 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 simply tap Recover All.

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 a bit to find them, especially if they’re old and you have a lot of new messages cluttering your inbox.

For more, check out the iOS 17 feature that makes your iPhone more secure and how to turn off Google’s Find My Device network (and why you might want to).