Is there anyway to recover deleted iMessages off of an iPhone?

If you are running iOS 16, deleted messages are stored for approximately 30 days.

Open Messages

Tap on Edit in the upper left corner

Tap on Show Recently Deleted

If the messages are not there, they are gone.

Unless you have an old backup you can restore that would still have them.

Once a message is deleted, the next backup will pick up that action, so the message is deleted from the next backup.

To restore a message from a backup, the user would have to somehow run a backup while the message was still on the phone, and then immediately turn off backups. How would the user know in advance to do this?

So, the chances of ever retrieving a deleted message from a backup are probably a tiny fraction above zero.

If Show Recently Deleted does not show up, this means that there are no messages that have been deleted within the last 30 days.

You can verify this by deleting a message that you no longer need. Now, Show Recently Deleted will be displayed.

A few weeks ago, there were messages in Show Recently Deleted but those messages all passed the 30 day time limit and were all permanently deleted.

Off of the iPhone? Like wanting to transfer them somewhere else? Or back on the iPhone that they were deleted from? Depending on what iOS version you are on you may be able to recover recently deleted ones by clicking on Edit at the top left of the messages app and clicking on Show Recently Deleted. If you haven’t deleted them from that folder and it wasn’t automatically permanently deleted after the days remaining number expired for each message they will be there. Otherwise they are gone. Unless you have an old backup you can restore that would still have them.

It is why I said “Unless…”. The likelihood isn’t as tiny as you think considering a lot of people opt not to use iCloud for backup because it doesn’t take long for that free 5GB to become useless….and the amount of users that don’t want to pay for any kind of storage is not small. In that same vein a lot of users that rely on manually backing up to computer don’t do it regularly. That could be relevant if the texts are older and they deleted them recently without intending to. Unfortunately I have a few of those very people in my household despite having access to shared iCloud storage (just waiting on the day it will come back to haunt them). Because the OP never specified how long ago the texts were deleted or anything else mentioning the option is still valid, regardless of how remote the possibility is that they have an old backup with the texts and not automatically assuming they use iCloud for their backups. If the “unless” doesn’t apply to them then no harm, no foul. Doesn’t make mentioning it something that should be left out because that “tiny fraction above zero” still means someone can benefit from it.

Why would the show recently deleted option not be showing up? It was a few weeks ago but now it’s not.