Many believe their text messages are safe and secure for good and even if they were erased by them there's a magical place somewhere they are stored. May it be your provider keeping a copy of them? For a text message (SMS), that is not the case. Once you delete it, it's pretty much gone. The good news is – it's recoverable. And we will provide you with the instructions on one of the most efficient ways to recover deleted text messages on iPhone with Disk Drill.

#1 Disk Drill – the iPhone data recovery solution

If your phone provider keeps silent or doesn't believe you may be entitled to accessing your recorded text messages; if your iTunes and iCloud backups are empty or didn't store the deleted text message you are looking for, it's time to try Disk Drill.

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Download Disk Drill
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Install our iPhone recovery app
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Get ready to recover

#2 What's next with iPhone text message recovery?

Even when deleted, your text messages will most probably live on your phone's storage device for some time, until overwritten by other data. The best advice here is to try the recovery with Disk Drill as soon as you can, and actually stop using your handset completely until you confirm the message in question is recovered, or is not recoverable at all. The longer you use your iPhone after the deletion occurred, the higher the chances are that part of the storage memory gets overwritten with other data thus driving that text unrecoverable.

#3 Disk Drill to extract your deleted text messages

Launch Disk Drill, locate your iPhone in it, click "Recover" and wait. After a quick scan you will see a list of recoverable items, your texts among them, grouped in "Chats" category. There's no guarantee all your messages from the past will show up, and the only way to ensure the recovery is trying the scan and previewing the found items.

#4 What's inside a text message?

You might be wondering about the format your deleted text messages will be recovered in by Disk Drill. Reasonable question. We were experimenting with quite a few, and for now, Chats from Messages app are recovered in CSV, that's Comma-Separated Values. Sounds a bit too techy, but it's a very common format actually.

iPhone data recovery software for Mac

Once you see your text messages in Disk Drill, highlight them one by one and hit "Preview" to ensure the ones you are looking for are actually there. CSV can easily be previewed in QuickLook. The deleted text message might not look the same as on your phone, and we will improve that in Disk Drill, but for the time being, the data inside a message is far more important. Do the preview, mark the needed items for recovery, and proceed.

It's a good time to enable backups

Disk Drill is not able of protecting data on your iPhones or iPads, but for your desktop Mac or Windows, it's becoming an unbelievably handy tool. Disk Drill will enable data protection and prevent an accidental data loss without any external data storage, or NAS. Read more about our Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery algorithms.

#5 Time to recover deleted text messages

Instead of overwriting your iPhone with the old data from a backup that's no longer relevant, and finding out that backup actually did not contain the needed texts, we are using Disk Drill to recover just what you needed from your iPhone, in this case, it's your deleted text messages. We are at the final step.

How to recover deleted files on Mac

Once the needed texts are selected, click "Recover". It will take a seconds to save the rescued text messages into files. Now you can use QuickLook, Numbers or Excel to get the data out of your CSV files. In fact, they are stored in plain text, and you actually can read them in any text editor. This won't restore deleted text messages to your iPhone, but that's how you can easily scoop the data out of your iPhone which otherwise seemed irreversibly lost. Thanks for giving Disk Drill a try!

Scan iPhone. Retrieve your deleted text messages.

Disk Drill implements several iPhone recovery algorithms and actually Deep Scan is not of them. However, it does help with plenty of other data recovery scenarios. It's good to know that Disk Drill does provide you with a choice of data recovery methods in case one of them doesn't produce the anticipated result.

Multiple recovery methods