Muggleborn

Q: All text messages deleted, except for one

Woke up this morning to find that all text messages from my phone had mysteriously been deleted, except for one - and in this message, the entire thread was gone except for the most recent text (presumably received after the mass deletion). Of course I don't have a recent backup, not even with iCloud, but the strange thing is that not even 3rd party apps such as Phone Rescue have been able to find any record of my texts.

The only thing I did out of the ordinary last night was plug in my phone to my computer to charge. I purposefully didn't sync it with iTunes or Photos, since they make my computer run very slowly and I was watching a video at the same time.

I had a chat conversation with an Apple support person, and they were unable to find a solution to the problem - they advised me to set up iCloud to make sure things were backing up, but even then, they said there's no way for messages to back up to iCloud.

Has this happened to anyone before?

iPhone 5s, iOS 9.3.2

Posted on Aug 25, 2016 6:08 AM

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Q: All text messages deleted, except for one

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  • by tim_135,

    tim_135 tim_135 Aug 25, 2016 6:45 PM in response to Muggleborn
    Community Specialists
    Aug 25, 2016 6:45 PM in response to Muggleborn

    Hi Muggleborn,

     

    Thanks for posting in the Apple Support Communities! I understand you had some messages randomly disappear off of your iPhone. I can certainly understand your concern as I wouldn't want to lose anything in my messages either. I'm happy to provide some direction here. 

     

    The first thing I want to make sure you've checked is the option to keep text messages. You can double check this setting by going to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and make sure that it's set to forever. The other 2 options of 30 days and 1 year will delete the messages after that period of time has passed. 

     

    If you haven't already, you'll also want to restart your iPhone. 

    Restart your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

    How to restart

    1. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red slider appears.
    2. Drag the slider to turn your device completely off.
    3. After the device turns off, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button again until you see the Apple logo.

    Just be sure that you don't do the force restart mentioned in the article

     

    I also recommend that you backup your iPhone regularly to either iTunes or iCloud. A backup also backs up messages so if you ever lose information on your iPhone in the future, you can easily restore your backup. I've included some resources below that go over what's included in backups as well as how to get those backups going. 

    About backups for iOS devices

    How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

     

    Take care!

  • by Xixi820,

    Xixi820 Xixi820 Sep 4, 2016 11:45 PM in response to tim_135
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 4, 2016 11:45 PM in response to tim_135

    This same exact thing happened to me today!! My phone shut off out of the blue and all my pictures deleted and all my message threads deleted. Apple takes all of our money and cant give us any resolutions for this issue and it ***** because this happened after updating to ios 9.3.5. I had so many important messages and it's still showing that its taking up storage on my phone so I'm confused on what to do going forward.