Restoring Messages - iPhone

The Black Oil

Like an eejit, I've just mistakenly deleted all text messages from one person on my 6s. Pretty important too, it's my work phone.

Looking at https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/ I unfortunately see no icon for Messages...only Mail, Contacts, Photos, etc. However, iCloud drive is there and it says there was a backup on May 4th which is something at least.

On the device itself, looking at iCloud storage I can't see a date. Messages appear to be only 1MB. Mind you, they're largely only text as I don't really get multimedia stuff.

Is the best option to do a restore and reset of the whole phone?

FourFourRED

Do you have messages turned to green in the following location?:

Settings > Name > iCloud

If messages is green and you have deleted the threads, they’re gone for good. They’re syncing with iCloud in real time and are NOT included in your iCloud backup. If you delete a message, it will delete across all of your devices. There is no “recently deleted” section of messages and no option online to recover deleted messages.

If messages is off in that section. Erase your iPhone in settings and restore from the iCloud backup on the 4th of May and you will have all of the messages that were on your phone at that date.

The Black Oil

FourFourFM wrote: »

Do you have messages turned to green in the following location?:

Settings > Name > iCloud

If messages is green and you have deleted the threads, they’re gone for good. They’re syncing with iCloud in real time and are NOT included in your iCloud backup. If you delete a message, it will delete across all of your devices. There is no “recently deleted” section of messages and no option online to recover deleted messages.

If messages is off in that section. Erase your iPhone in settings and restore from the iCloud backup on the 4th of May and you will have all of the messages that were on your phone at that date.

Yes, green there.

Dammit.

I started from scratch earlier on this evening. It has restored the apps and everything, but not that person's texts. Years worth of stuff, damn careless.

FourFourRED

It would be safer to have that setting disabled going forward if you want to be able to restore accidentally deleted messages in the future as you can restore an iCloud backup, you can’t restore deleted messages if they’re synced in the cloud (which is ridiculous really).

The Black Oil

OK, I forgot about this...posting again now. If I go to turn green off, it says

Messages have not been fully downloaded to this iPhone. Disable and download messages or cancel.

What do I do?

The Black Oil

Just did it again, gah.