How to Get Back a Text Message You Deleted

Whenever you read a text, do you delete it or keep it on your iPhone? Many of us leave the message threads indefinitely to languish for weeks, months, or even years. But it can be extremely easy to accidentally delete a text in the Messages app. A long swipe and a tap is all it takes to lose years of messages. If that happens to you, don’t panic. If you act fast, you can restore the entirety of your text thread. You just need to know what to do. 

Read more: iPhone 16: What We Know About the Release Date, Leaks and More

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 all the new Messages features you’ll get on iOS 18 this fall.

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 more about how to opt out of Google’s Find My Device network (and why you might want to).