Have you ever deleted a text message from your iPhone and then quickly regretted doing this? If so, here’s an overview of some options that might let you recover that text message. Unlike deleted voicemail messages or deleted email messages, there isn’t a Trash or Deleted Items folder for text messages. In other words, you can’t quickly recover your text message from your iPhone yourself. Instead, your can try to recover the text message from another device or to buy a product like Mac FoneLab or iExplorer, which currently cost $90 and $35, respectively.
If you have setup your iPad or Mac to receive text messages then you might be able to recover the text message from one of these other devices. Simply open the Messages application on the iPad or Mac and see if you can locate the desired text message. If so, you’re all set. Maybe you’d like to forward it to your cell phone or copy the text into an email, then send it to yourself or another person. This is certainly the simplest and least expensive way to recover text messages. However, if it’s not an option for you then you could look at buying Mac FoneLab or iExplorer.
Mac FoneLab and iExplorer both let you try to recover data directly from the iPhone or from backups of the iPhone. This is another reason why you should backup your iPhone. I previously wrote about how to backup your iPhone to your Mac and/or iCloud. Both applications give you a fairly user-friendly way to search, view and recover data from the iPhone backups or from the iPhone itself. For example, you can the either browse through the text messages or search them by name, phone number or email address.
FoneLab also offers a way to recover data from iCloud backups. FoneLab asks you to enter your AppleID username and password so it can login to your iCloud account and access the backup data. Initially, FoneLab told me that my AppleID password was incorrect even though I knew I had typed my password correctly. It occurred to me that the problem could be that I had two-step authentication enabled for my AppleID account. I disabled this feature and then FoneLab was able to successfully login. I indicated that I wanted to recover text messages, then FoneLab attempted to download my iCloud backup data. FoneLab struggled to download the iCloud backup data, for unknown reasons. However, after telling it a couple of times to continue to try to download the data, it was successful. After downloading the iCloud backup data, it analyzed it and let me browse it and search through it.
Hopefully one of these options will let you recover the data that you seek.