Summary: How do you recover deleted iMessages on an iPhone? This article tells you five effective methods to retrieve deleted/lost iMessages from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Even if you don’t have iCloud or iTunes/Finder backups, you still have a big chance to find your valuable messages back.
iMessage serves as the most convenient and economical way to communicate among Apple users. Like Facebook, X, and other social apps, it lets you send/receive text messages, stickers, audio, videos, photos, and more.
You may delete one or more critical iMessage conversations by mistake or lose them due to other reasons. It can be a common issue when managing multiple chats, especially when dealing with spam messages. Keep following this guide to recover deleted iMessages from your iPhone or iPad with ease.
Yes, you can retrieve deleted iMessages on your iPhone or iPad.
Apple has built a “Recently Deleted” feature into iOS devices for you to restore your deleted messages easily. It acts as a safety net for mistakenly deleted files.
What’s more, you can restore deleted iMessages from iCloud or iTunes/Finder backups. Even if you don’t have a suitable backup, and your messages seem to be permanently erased, there are dedicated iOS data recovery tools for you to rescue these lost files from your iPhone or iPad.
If you can’t find target iMessages from the Recently Deleted folder, and you don’t have backups to restore, turn to the reputable FoneLab iPhone Data Recovery. It offers the highest success rate for recovering deleted and erased iOS files, even permanently deleted ones. FoneLab supports various commonly used data types, including messages, photos, videos, notes, contacts, call history, and reminders.
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Launch this iMessage recovery tool and connect your iOS device to the computer. As you can see, the software allows you to restore data from the device itself, iTunes backups, and iCloud backups.
As mentioned above, you can retrieve other iOS files, such as pictures, videos, Safari bookmarks and history, and more. Select the useful ones and perform the recovery.
Aiseesoft FoneLab supports all commonly used iPhone and iPad models, including iPhone 17 Pro Max/17 Pro/Air/17, iPhone 16 Pro Max/16 Pro/16 Plus/16/16e, iPhone 15/14/13/12, iPad Pro/Air/mini, and older models. What’s more, iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are well supported.
If you have a relatively new iPhone or iPad running iOS 16 or iPadOS 16.1 or later, you can use the Recently Deleted folder for iMessage recovery. You are allowed to directly restore iMessages, standard text messages, and conversations that you deleted within the last 30 to 40 days.
If you often back up your iOS data to iCloud, you can restore deleted iMessages from a suitable backup file.
Note that this method requires you to perform a factory reset first. Moreover, the operation may cause you to lose any data created since the backup was made.
If you have a suitable iTunes (Windows) or Finder (Mac) backup on your computer, you can also perform a recovery through “Restore Backup”. Like iCloud restoration, this method will restore your entire device state from the backup time point.
Question 1. Where is iMessage history stored?
If you never delete iMessages on your iPhone or iPad, you can open the Messages app and view all the iMessage history. If you want to view the specific iMessages you have deleted before, use FoneLab iPhone Data Recovery, which we recommended above, to retrieve them. If you have a suitable backup, you can also restore your iOS device from the backup to find lost messages.
Question 2. Do deleted iPhone messages stay on my iPad?
If you use iCloud Messages, deleted iMessages will also be removed from linked Apple devices, including your iPad. By default, your messages are synced across your devices when Messages is turned on in iCloud. In that case, your received iPhone messages will be sent to your iPad, Mac, or another iPhone. Surely, these synced messages won’t be directly removed from the iPad once you delete them on your iPhone. You may still find them if you act quickly.
Question 3. Where are iMessages stored?
Your iMessages can be stored in three key locations. First, all the received and sent messages will be saved locally on your iPhone, iPad, and linked Apple devices. If you have enabled iCloud backup for Messages, synced messages will be available across all your iOS devices. What’s more, if you have ever created a backup that contains all the related iOS files, you can also find your iMessages within the backup.
Conclusion
You can learn three different ways to recover deleted iMessages from your iPhone and iPad on this page. A professional data recovery tool, FoneLab, is recommended to help you rescue these lost iMessage conversations. It lets you preview and select specific messages to recover. When you fail to find deleted iMessages from the Recently Deleted folder, this tool is often the better choice.
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