I Thought I Lost My iPhone Texts Forever Until I Tried This

We've all been there. One wrong tap and suddenly, a text thread you meant to keep is gone. But here's the good news. It's surprisingly easy to accidentally delete messages in the iPhone Messages app. That doesn't mean they're gone for good. If you move quickly, there's a simple way to get those deleted texts back before they disappear forever.

Before iOS 16, you had to restore your iPhone from a backup to retrieve the message. This isn't the case anymore, and you can restore deleted messages right within the Messages app. There's a catch, though.

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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 making iOS 18 sizzle.

Locate your deleted text messages

The Recently Deleted section in Messages will show all messages you've deleted within the past 30 days. Screenshot by Blake Stimac/CNET© Provided by CNET

All of 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.

You can also recover all deleted text messages at once. Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET© Provided by CNET

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