One of iphone transfer the great things about working on Decipher IFONEMATE is that I often get to help people recover very precious data, such as text messages that were accidentally deleted from their iOS device. It's been a while since I wrote about recovering deleted text messages on the iPhone (as well as iPad or iPod Touch1), so it's definitely time for an update.

When messages are deleted in the iOS text message app, they are simply "marked as deleted", to be written over by new texts later.

This guide will help you view messages erased from an iOS device, by using Decipher IFONEMATE, which scans through the text message data that hasn't been overwritten yet, and finds deleted messages.

Step 0: Don't touch your phone yet!
Before we do anything with the phone, we're going to search your computer (automatically) for any existing text-message data in your iPhone backups. Even if you don't think you've backed up recently, iTunes occasionally runs a backup when you sync your phone, so it's worth a look. If the messages you erased are sitting not-erased in a backup already, our job gets significantly easier!

Step 1: Download and run the free trial of Decipher IFONEMATE
Grab the installer for Decipher IFONEMATE from our website here. Install it, and run it once. As Decipher IFONEMATE starts up, it will scan your iTunes backup directory automatically and look for any backups you already have on your computer.

In the main program window (with the three columns), you'll see all of your iOS devices2. Click on the device you're interested in if it is there2 and click on the contacts for which you want to view text messages. If the messages were not deleted when this backup was taken, then you'll see the messages here!

(If you don't see your phone listed here at all, we'll be adding it to the program in steps 2 and 3.)

(If the messages were already deleted at the point of the last backup, don't worry, we'll look for them in step 3.)

Looking for deleted iPhone text messages in the main Decipher IFONEMATE window.

Take a quick look in main Decipher IFONEMATE window to see if the messages you deleted are in your older backups.
Step 2: Make a new backup of your iPhone in iTunes
Decipher IFONEMATE gets its data from your iPhone backups, so we need to make a new backup to get the latest data from your iPhone. To make a new iPhone backup, do the following:

Plug your iPhone into your computer using the USB cable3.

Open iTunes on your computer.

In iTunes, select your iPhone from the list of devices. Your devices will appear either in the upper-left corner of the window, the left side of the window, or in the upper-right corner as a button like in the following screenshots:

iTunes with the iPhones listed in the left corner of the window.

iTunes with the iPhones listed in the right corner of the window.

iTunes with the iPhones listed on the left side of the window.

(If this is your first time using this phone with iTunes, you may be asked to "trust" or "authorize" this computer. If so, unlock your phone from the home screen and press the "trust" button on the dialog that appears on the phone.)

(If this is your first time using this phone with iTunes, you may see a big welcome screen asking whether mobiletransf you want to set up your phone as a new phone, or restore from a backup. You should choose to set it up as a new device. Scary as the choice sounds, this won't wipe your phone, it just adds the iPhone to iTunes. If you're in doubt, please feel free to contact us and we'll help guide you!)

Once you've selected your iPhone, the summary screen will appear in iTunes. In the Backups section, press the "Back Up Now" button. It doesn't matter whether encryption is on or off for your backups; Decipher IFONEMATE can read the encrypted backups if you provide the password.

Wait patiently until the backup completes, which could be a few minutes if it's been a while since your last backup. You can see view the progress of the backup at the top of the iTunes window.

Step 3: Use the Recovery Feature of Decipher IFONEMATE
Close Decipher IFONEMATE if it's still open from step 1, and reopen it. After the new backup is imported into the program and the main window appears, select your iPhone from the list of devices on the left side of the window2 and then press the Recover button.

Press the recover button in Decipher IFONEMATE to view your deleted iPhone text messages.
Use the recover button in Decipher IFONEMATE to search for deleted text messages.
A new window will open with the results of our search for deleted text messages. Let's explore:

To keep the results manageable, we paginate the list of recovered text messages. To the upper-left of the messages list, you can change the amount of messages that you see at one time. Beneath the list of messages you should see previous and next links to page through the results.

The messages will be sorted in reverse chronological order. Occasionally, we can't recover the date of the message, so if you don't see your message in the date order it appears, don't give up hope yet! (Also, look at the very end of the list for messages, which is where messages with no dates go!)

Just to the upper-right of the messages, there is a search bar that you can use to filter the messages if you know what you're looking for.

You may notice that some messages are listed by contact (or phone number) and others just say "Deleted Contact" and a number. Unfortunately, sometimes the contact information isn't fully recoverable; in these cases, we correlate "the same" contact in multiple messages by using the same deleted-contact number.

Below the main list of recovered text messages, you'll see a list of fragments. Fragments are chunks of text for which we couldn't find all of the message information, but it looks enough like a message that we want to show it to you. Fragments have the same pagination and filter text box just like the message list.