How do i recover old voicemails after upgrading phones?

You cannot locate individual information in a backup. That is not possible. If the backups were made in iTunes or iCloud, your voicemail should be there, if you are using Visual Voicemail (VVM). If you restored the new phone from the backup of the old one, they should have come over. If you still have the old device, make sure the VVM is on the old phone, then create another backup and try the restore again.

Voicemail does come from a server, but it is your carrier. And, depending on the carrier, it will only exist there for a period of about 30 days, unless you change that. Many carrier allow you to save a certain number of voicemails for an extended period of time, but that requires you to log into your voicemail and setting it. You will need to check with your carrier. Once a Visual Voicemail is downloaded to the iPhone, it only exists there, but it should also exist in your backup. You can also try and restore the device to a backup that was made when the voicemail was on the phone.

Thanks Chris. I spoke to at&t and they confirmed it is gone unfortunately. I had no idea that the voicemails existed only on my phone after 30 days. If I had known I would have downloaded it elsewhere, especially before I wiped the old phone. That to me is pretty important info for everyone to know.

Well, that is a carrier function. Thing is, if you used cellular devices in the past, and I'm not judging you just providing a background, your regular voicemail when you called into it would prompt you about saving voicemail, since it was only saved on the server for 30 days. You had an option to save it for an additional 30 days if you wanted, but it was never archived forever. After just losing my mother, I can understand your issue, but that is how it is. Otherwise, the carriers couldn't support saving all that voicemail. As it is, too many people don't delete their voicemail, and when you go to leave them a message, you get a recording that the mailbox is full.

I am having an issue with this too. I just did a back up for the info on my iphone 7 via itunes since I am upgrading to an 8; I was going through my new phone to make sure all my contacts, emails, apps etc. had transferred over okay and in the process noticed all of my voicemails were missing. I JUST did this backup, where are my voicemails? Any idea where to find them within the backup?

The backup was fine it turned out. The visual voicemails did not transfer over until my new phone had cell service from my carrier. So I wonder if this service has anything at all to do with the actual backup and is only related to disabling your old phone and activating your new phone..

monicaw84 wrote:

The backup was fine it turned out. The visual voicemails did not transfer over until my new phone had cell service from my carrier.

You did not indicate that your device did not have cell service. Voicemail as I said is a carrier function, and the carrier determines if you have access to voicemail, so the phone needed that cellular connection to finish upgrading to the new phone. What service are you referring to? I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say this:

monicaw84 wrote:

So I wonder if this service has anything at all to do with the actual backup and is only related to disabling your old phone and activating your new phone..

I am in the same boat 😟. I had a voicemail from my mom who passed away last year and now it's gone. Did anyone ever find a way to retrieve them? They must be on a server somewhere??

Using either an iCloud or iTunes backup will bring back your voicemail.

You do backup your phone on a regular basis right?

I just helped a friend in the US to transfer from her iPhone 4 to iPhone 6 plus and had the same issue.

We did an iTunes back-up and everything transferred except voicemails. She had 3 years worth of important voicemails that she wanted to keep.

She is with ATT and apparently they only keep voicemail for 2 weeks then it is automatically deleted from their server.

Luckily she had backed up her old phone to iTunes AND that was backed up in Time Machine!

If you backed up your old phone in iTunes you can retrieve the voicemails from there but they are not easy to access - we used 3rd party software to retrieve them as described in this article: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/tutorials/how-to-access-voicemail-on-iphone

IMPORTANT - do NOT back-up your new phone in iTunes until you have retrieved your voicemail.

iTunes will overwrite the back up of your old phone with the info. on your new phone - then the voicemails will disappear.

We did this 😟

but because my friend had TIME MACHINE backups, we were able to enter time machine and copy the old iPhone backup into the backup folder on her MacBook:

Library > Application Support> MobileSync> Backup

Then we could install the iExplore software and she now has access to her voicemail again.

::phew!::

Did you ever find away to do this? I have voice mails from my mom that I saved after see passed away last year. For some reason they were not there anymore.