Urgent help needed - my wife’s whole iMessage conversation deleted

Hi there,

I went to message my wife this morning only to discover that our iMessage conversation has disappeared. We have been messaging for at least 5 years and I cannot lose these messages. They are so important for me as have everything on there including when our son was born.

I had to start a new message thread to message her today. I don’t know, maybe our son deleted them, but he’s only a toddler, so even if he did I should be able to restore from a back up but it’s not working.

I’ve got iCloud backup turned on and there were two backups this week. I’ve tried to restore from the one last night and also from the one last Monday. Neither are showing any of the messages. It’s so strange as when it’s happened before, I have just restored from a few days before and it’s been fine.

The backup from Monday is still downloading now so I will wait until it’s complete. But everyone else’s iMessages are already there now.

What could have happened? We have been messaging all week and they were definitely there on Friday.

Another thing is when restoring my phone the only other backup it shows was from June. Even though I’ve had iCloud back up on all the time. I don’t really want to restore from this far back as all my content between now and then will be gone.

Does anyone have any ideas? I cannot lose these. Is there any other reason apart from being accidentally deleted why they aren’t showing? Bugs etc?

At least is there a way to backup now then restore June’s back up, then save all the historical messages then reload today’s backup?

I’ve got iPhone XR with iOS 12.4.1.