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How to recover deleted text messages on iPhone 6S Plus

I backed up my iPhone 6S Plus regularly via iCloud and I thought everything would be backed up on there. Recently, I got a lot of spamming messages from unknown resources. So today i am gonna to clean the mess. I don't know how many messages selected for deletion. What i am sure is that all the spamming messages were deleted but until now i am aware a few important ones(customer mailing address) being deleted too.


Then I choose to restore from iCloud but there was no option out there for text messages. What i need to do to recover the deleted text messages?

iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.1

Posted on Nov 28, 2015 7:53 PM

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8 replies

Nov 28, 2015 8:03 PM in response to gtkdevops

I backed up my iPhone 6S Plus regularly via iCloud and I thought everything would be backed up on there. Recently, I got a lot of spamming messages from unknown resources. So today i am gonna to clean the mess. I don't know how many messages selected for deletion. What i am sure is that all the spamming messages were deleted but until now i am aware a few important ones(customer mailing address) being deleted too.


Then I choose to restore from iCloud but there was no option out there for text messages. What i need to do to recover the deleted text messages?

iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.1

You didn't sync your iphone to iCloud, but if you sync your iPhone to iTunes, you may restore iPhone messages from recent iTunes backup, If not, I think you have to try the professional iPhone data recovery tool, like Mobiledic.

Jul 6, 2016 7:46 AM in response to gtkdevops

You only have a couple of options:

1. use an old iTunes backup if you have it - the problem is that if your backup is older, you will lose anything that was stored to the phone after the date of that backup.


2. Use 3rd party software - but not just any one. I went through this just recently. I searched and found a couple of apps that are highly advertised on the web, and they are pricey, but when you need it, you need it - I demo'd two of them and finally purchased one of them but it ended up falling way short of what I wanted to actually do. I wanted to recover a full text conversation with attachments and put it back on the phone itself. Most applications I found couldn't do that (although they imply they can in the product description), they would just extract the information and make a pdf of the text conversation showing thumbnails of the attachments, and then you would have to still recover the actual attachment files - none of this went back into the phone and into the message app. So better than nothing, but I was really surprised that something so simple to ask was so difficult to do. Most of these apps were purely data recovery for photos, contacts, SMS messages (in a readable HTML file), etc. but they didn't really put them back on the phone.


I almost gave up, but I finally found a 3rd party app called Backuptrans iPhone recovery. This was half the price of the other apps and worked perfectly. There may be other apps but this was the only one I could find. It was able to recover the full SMS conversation and automatically merged the parts I deleted with new messages that had been stored on the phone since I accidentally deleted the conversation. Worked perfectly, all the thumbnails and actual attachments were restored to the phone in the messaging application like I wanted. Apple should have something like this. The only thing I didn't like was that again there was a leap of faith that it would just work - the app scans the iTunes backup that you select on your computer and compares it to the current state of your iPhone messages. It then finds all the messages in the backup that are missing in the phone, and merges them with one click. You don't get to select what to restore, so if you purposely deleted something more recently than the date of your iTunes backup, then you'll need to delete it again. Small price to pay as it just works.


Make sure you don't overwrite your old backup in iTunes though before you do this. You need to shut off the automatic sync or you can "archive" the iTunes backup so it doesn't get overwritten. You have to go into iTunes Preferences, select the "Devices" icon, and you'll see the phone backups listed. Hold the "control" button while left clicking the mouse on the date of the backup you want to archive which will reveal the archive button. There is a bit of leap of faith when you hit the "archive" button because you get no indication that anything happened. When you backup your current iPhone state, you'll see that the backup you archived was created in the list, and the new backup is the most recent. I wish Apple would make these things a little more user friendly. This shouldn't have to be hidden like this.


I think this program can also search the deleted items in the iPhone memory and restore from there (if you don't have an iTunes backup), but I didn't try this. I tried this using those other apps and it was a bit dodgy because things were missing because the Phone starts to overwrite the deleted data. In a pinch it might be the best you can do.


I highly advise making an iTunes backup archive before messing with this. If you backed up your phone already since you deleted the messages, you may be out of luck, but you can still get at least a transcript of the messages using those other apps


Good luck

Jul 14, 2016 7:18 PM in response to gtkdevops

SMS/MMS are not synced with an application on your computer or included with the iTunes sync process in any way except for being included with your iPhone's backup which is updated by iTunes as the first step during the iTunes sync process. The data included with the iPhone's backup is not stored in your iTunes library. This link provides the data on your iPhone that is included with your iPhone's backup.


If you have no backup, you still have a chance to recover your data like messages, photos or contacts from your iPhone without backup.


You need a program which can identify iOS system and scan your lost data.

See it on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/app/?sk=app_208195102528120

Aug 29, 2016 8:05 AM in response to gtkdevops

To get back lost messages from an iCloud backup, you need first erase all the content and settings on your iPhone by tapping Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. When the erasure finishes, the iPhone will reboot to the Hello screen. Follow the onscreen setup steps until you reach the Apps & Data screen, then tap Restore from iCloud Backup. Sign in to iCloud with your Apple ID, choose a backup, stay connected and wait for a progress bar to appear and complete.

If the iCloud backup is not the most current or you don’t want to lose the data created after the backup, you still have other choices to recover the deleted text messages: extracting the messages from the iCloud backup or recovering directly from the iPhone storage.

Nov 8, 2016 12:19 AM in response to gtkdevops

I don’t have any iTunes and iCloud backup of the lost text messages so that I have to use a third app. There are so many apps that claims to recover deleted text messages and other files from iOS devices for me to choose from, however, most of them cannot get the found text messages back to the device except this one: http://retrievedeletedtextmessagesiphone.aolor.com/

How to recover deleted text messages on iPhone 6S Plus

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