restore conversation in iPhone iOS 14.4

burna33 wrote:

The "backup" is what I do still have on my Mac in iMessages. I decline to use iCloud so there's nothing there and I do backup but only for my Mac files, not the iPhone.

I would strongly recommend you start backing up your iPhone. It will save you much grief if your phone gets lost, stolen, damaged or just has an unexplainable glitch that deletes all of your data (happened to me once a number of years ago).

Back up iPhone - Apple Support

I was sure I had come across some sort of "undo" recent "deleted" flies

iOS 16 added a "Recently Deleted" folder of Messages. It's not at all clear what phone you have as an iPhone 5 can only have iOS 10.3.4. Even an iPhone 5S can't be updated beyond iOS 12.5.7. Neither can run iOS 14.4. And, even if you have some other phone capable of running iOS 16, if you hadn't already updated prior to deleting, it won't help.

burna33 wrote:

How can I restore a deleted conversation on iPhone 5 with iOS 14.4?

From your backup if you have one and weren't syncing them to the cloud.

burna33 wrote:

I do indeed have an iPhone SE (a 5 something) and it does indeed have iOS 14.4. And I don't do much of anything important on it so not worried about the backing up. But thanks for the reminder. An earlier phone, a flip, died suddenly and I had to recreate my address book. But it's all on my Mac so no worries. :-)

Just for the future, an iPhone SE is an iPhone SE, not an iPhone 5. Completely different phones.

Best of luck.

burna33 wrote:

The "backup" is what I do still have on my Mac in iMessages. I decline to use iCloud so there's nothing there and I do backup but only for my Mac files, not the iPhone.

I was sure I had come across some sort of "undo" recent "deleted" flies -- perhaps only for attached photos -- and was hoping the same sort of "undo" would be available for mistakenly deleting an entire conversation. (I had used Edit and selected only certain embedded photos and videos from this recent "conversation" but clicked on the top left "Delete All Selected" and was surprised that instead, I had deleted the entire conversation.)

No backups no recovery.