How to see deleted messages on iPhone: A step-by-step guide to recover your messages

Olivia Munson, USA TODAY
Updated ·2 min read

Have you ever cleaned out your iPhone messages and accidentally deleted an important conversation? Or maybe you meant to get rid of a different message than the one you actually deleted.

If you have iOS 16 or later, your conversation is not completely lost. The iPhone and other Apple products have a feature that gives you access to deleted messages.

Before you start to panic over a lost text, here is a step-by-step guide on how to see deleted messages on an iPhone, plus how to get them back.

How to see deleted messages on iPhone

Apple outlines these steps to see deleted messages:

  • Open the Messages app.

  • Touch "Edit" in the top left of the screen. If you have message filtering on, you will choose "Filters" in the top left instead.

  • Select "Recently Deleted" at the bottom of the list.

This will show all of your deleted conversations from the last 30 days. More recently deleted messages will be at the top of the list, while ones toward the bottom will be older.

The number of days displayed next to the conversation stands for how many days left until the conversation is permanently deleted from your phone.

However, this will not show you the complete conversation. To get that, you need to retrieve the message.

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How to retrieve deleted text messages

To get messages back, click on the conversation you want to retrieve. You can select multiple conversations at once.

Then choose "Recover" in the bottom right of the screen. This will prompt you with a pop-up. Select "Recover [number of] Messages" to confirm the retrieval. The conversation will be sent back to "All Messages."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How to recover deleted messages from your iPhone