Accidentally deleted a message that you now want back? Learn how to see recently deleted SMS or iMessage and easily recover them on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
The Recently Deleted section in the Messages app keeps your deleted messages for 30 days before permanently removing them. If you act within these 30 days, you can easily recover those SMS texts or iMessage.
Also see: How to recover deleted photos and videos on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
On iPhone or iPad
1) Open the Messages app.
2) Tap Filters from the top left of your iPhone screen and select Recently Deleted. If you’re on an iPad, tap the sidebar icon. Note that if you have not turned on message filtering, tap Edit > Show Recently Deleted.
3) Now, you can tap Recover All to get back all your deleted messages. If you only want to get back one or a few conversations, tap inside their small round box to select them, and then tap Recover.
On Mac
1) Launch the Messages app and click View > Recently Deleted from the top menu bar. You can also press Control + Command + 5 to access your deleted messages.
2) Once you’re in the Recently Deleted area of your Mac’s Messages app, select a conversation from the left sidebar and pick Recover or Delete.
If you want to recover multiple conversations, select them while holding the Command key and then click Recover or Delete. Note that Command + A does not seem to work on this screen for selecting all conversations.
You can only recover all deleted messages of a conversation
The Messages app allows you to delete the entire conversation or go inside a conversation and delete just one or a few selected messages. In both cases, the entire deleted conversation or a few deleted messages of a conversation will move to the Recently Deleted section and stay there for 30 days.
However, when it comes to recovering, your only option is to recover all deleted messages of that conversation that you see on the Recently Deleted screen. You can’t pick and recover individual messages of a conversation.
For example, in the screenshot below, there are 19 deleted messages for Ankur iDB. My only option here is to recover all 19 deleted messages. I can’t select and recover just one, two, three, or a few of these 19 messages.
About old messages that delete automatically
You can set your iPhone to keep the messages only for 30 days or one year. After this, text messages that get older than 30 days or one year are deleted automatically to free up space.
When you go to Settings > Apps > Messages > Keep Messages and choose 30 Days or 1 Year to turn on the auto-delete feature, the confirmation popup says that it will permanently delete all text messages & attachments that are older than the selected time frame.
So if you ever venture out to enable this option, remember that it will instantly delete all old messages and may not push them to the Recently Deleted section, thus making those messages unrecoverable.
Deleting and recovering audio messages
By default, the audio messages you send or receive are automatically deleted after two minutes of listening to them. And when it’s auto-deleted, it does not go to the Recently Deleted section. Instead, it’s deleted permanently. If you don’t want to lose the voice note, you can tap Keep below the message or go to Settings > Apps > Messages > Expire and choose Never.
However, I found that if you manually delete an audio message (within 1 minute 59 seconds of listening to it), that audio message is moved to the Recently Deleted section and stays there for 30 days. You can recover it from there (and then re-listen to it or tap Keep to save it).
Instantly remove deleted messages
You can follow the above steps to access your Recently Deleted section and then use the Delete option to remove those messages immediately without having to wait for up to 30 days to have them vanish automatically.
Once you permanently delete a message, there is no way to recover it. But if you back up your iPhone daily to a Mac or PC, restoring that backup file may recover the deleted messages.
Check out next: How to have Messages keep your entire chat history in iCloud and synced across devices