Text messages don't actually get deleted

You are correct. My bf unknowingly was showing me how to look up contacts through the spotlight search, little did he or I know at the time that the first sentance of text messages would show up.

Oh how I did not like what I saw. 😟

I have also played with it on mine, it is hit or miss as you have to type in a keyword that is actually in the text. You cannot read the whole text, nor really tell who the actual sender or reciever is, only the other name exchanging the texts.

Seems to me if they are still in there enough to show up in spotlight search there has to be a way to recover them. But you cannot open them once they have been deleted.

There can be enough evidence just in that to get you in trouble.

Although the easiest solution is just to do the right dang thing in the first place and not be exchanging texts that you wouldn't want someone else to see. Grrrrrr!!!

But changing your settings will stop the spolight search from searching text messages, or email whatever you don't want to show up.

But all someone has to do if they can get to your phone is recheck the settings and bam!!

The truth will always come out in time anyway!

Hi there - can you help me.

I want to RECOVER text messages ACCIDENTLY deleted from my 32G i phone 4. The tried the spotlight thing and nothing showed up. When I did the deleting, I did the DELETE AND SWIPE METHOD. Please help if possible.

I have just had my Iphone searched by GF using device/software bought online, it revealed EVERY call and text EVER made by me on phone, including date, time sender and FULL content of all messages, it feels like i have had my mind read. HOW do i delete all from memory to stop this. Spotlight search finds nothing, but 3rd party devices can find EVERYTHING *** Apple ;-(

DCGOO wrote:
All that means is the constraint of a spotlight search has been limited to undeleted messages.

Thanks for the heads up.

It angers me that 2 years later, this is still an issue.

Windows deletes things so "you" can't search them out unless you're super techy.

Come on Apple - I can accept a false sense of security, just find a way to delete TEXTS from the phones "spotlight search" . It should be a flood light search or a interrogation room search.

i will send apple my thoughts. Yet another missed opportunity to fix stuff we beg them to fix for years.

Iphone 5. Latest Firmware..

I have Exactly the same problem as the Original Poster. I dont even have to type in a full word! Just single letters of the alphabet (certain ones) will pull out previews of texts I deleted months ago! And an Itunes synch does Not get rid of them, as some people have suggested on other forums!

This is my first ever iPhone. Apart from this issue I love it. Would of expected Apple to have sorted this out by now! Not good.

If you back up to iCloud or iTunes, and have not backed up since you deleted the messages, you can restore the backup and they will come back.

Caveat: You will lose all changes made to the phone since the last backup. Whether this is acceptable is entirely up to you.

Simply "erase all content and settings" and restore from the backup.

I am trying to retrieve text messages that were deleted. I had not backed up before they were deleted from the phone but have since restore the phone to factory settings. I have tried multiple ways to restore the messages as I lost a phone number for someone that had been texting me. If anyone knows how to restore or access the phone number I would greatly appreciate it. Note the phone number was used for sms only. thanks

Celeste

The fact is for some unknow reason Apple is keeping a record of these records whether you delete them or not, and it is not just a small record, for call history it can be many many months of deleted records it keeps , it has nothing to do with unused space or anything like that.

For sms they are stored in a file called SMS.db and for call history its called Call_History.db these files are hidden and you can only access them from the phone itself if the phone is jailbroken.

However what is more worrring is that these files are also in the backup stored in semi plain text ans you need only a plain text editor to read them not specialist software like something..

try for yourselfs..

Create a backup of you phone to your pc

Search for the backup location, (in mac you can go prefrences>devices>right click the backupo and click open in finder)

Open the following files in text editor

3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28   this is the sms databse

2b2b0084a1bc3a5ac8c27afdf14afb42c61a19ca   this is the call hsitory database

This is basic way to do it and there is alot of unreadable characters but you can still read alot of the sms and call istory if you look through

The big point is whyt it keeps these records even after syncing

Does anyone know if someting has changed with the sms database in IOS7?

Trying to recover a deleted sms, and I'm looking at the SqLite db directly, and can see that there is missing rows in the SMS db. As you can see the sequence below are missing ROWID 32378 and 32380.

Does the deleted rows end up in another database?