Accidentally Delete an iPhone Text? Here’s How to Get It Back

It’s easy to make a mistake on your iPhone and accidentally delete a text in the Messages app, but that error could turn to terror if the message had critical info that you didn’t want to lose. No worries — as long as you act within a reasonable amount of time, you can get that deleted message back.

Prior to iOS 16, you’d actually need to restore your iPhone from a backup to retrieve the message. Thankfully, this isn’t the case anymore, and you can restore deleted messages right within the Messages app. There’s a catch, though. 

Below, we’ll show you how to restore recently deleted messages with a couple of taps. 

For more, check out the iPhone settings you should change for a better night’s sleep and 7 new Android features announced in May 2024.

Locate your deleted text messages

All your deleted text messages can be found in the Messages app. To find your trashed messages, open Messages and tap the Edit option at the top left. Then tap Show Recently Deleted. 

A list of your recent text messages will appear, showing phone numbers or contacts, number of messages and days left until permanent deletion. This will include both entire message threads and individual texts that are deleted. However, you’ll be able to see (and recover) deleted messages only if they’ve been deleted in the last 30 days, so you have to act relatively fast.

Also, you can’t see the actual messages themselves, so you’ll have to recover them by recognizing the contact name or phone number. Once they’re recovered, you’ll be able to read the texts.

Recover the messages you want to restore

If you want to recover a text message, tap on the thread or message so that it’s selected, hit Recover on the bottom right, and then tap Recover Message in the pop-up that appears. You can also recover all of your deleted text messages at once — don’t select any message and then just tap Recover All.

Your recovered messages will appear in sequential order from when they were either sent or received, so you may have to scroll a bit through your existing texts to find them, especially if they’re old and you have a great deal of new messages cluttering up your inbox.

For more, read about the iOS 17 feature that gives your iPhone a security boost and how to opt out of Google’s Find My Device network (and why you might want to).