This is super useful if you accidentally deleted a message, or maybe you deleted a text out of an emotional response and after you’ve cooled down you have decided you want it back. We’re demonstrating this on an iPhone here, but it works the exact same on iPad. That process is quite different from what is covered here and has some drawbacks however, so we’ll cover that separately in another article.

Earlier versions do not have this capability available, however they may be able to recover deleted messages by restoring from old backups if you happen to have them available. The only real requirement to be able to restore deleted messages this way is to have the iPhone or iPad running a modern version of system software, versioned from iOS/iPadOS 16 or newer. If you had deleted a specific message from a thread, it will appear in the entire thread at the position it was in before being deleted. Now if you return to the primary Messages conversation screen, you’ll find the deleted messages are available again in the list of message threads. Tap to confirm you want to recover the message(s).Find the message threads / conversation(s) you want to retrieve and then tap on “Recover”.At the main conversation page, tap on “Edit” in corner.Restoring deleted messages directly on iPhone or iPad is super easy, here’s all you need to do: How to Recover Deleted Messages on iPhone & iPad The approach to retrieving deleted messages on iPhone and iPad that we will show here is done entirely on the device, it does not require you to restore the device from a backup, or use third party software. This works to restore all messages on iPhone, whether they’re iMessages, text messages, media, photos, videos, or otherwise, as long as the message is within the Messages app on iPhone, or iPad. As long as the deleted messages are within 30 days old, you’ll be able to find them on the iPhone or iPad to restore those deleted messages and read them again.

Find old imessages on mac