Messages in the Cloud - lost texts

[sdwaltz]

My mother in law passed away about a year and a half ago. Naturally, my wife wants to make sure that the messages between she and her mother are never lost, so she never deleted anything and always kept her phone backed up to iCloud.

Anyway, last week she was randomly prompted to turn on iMessage in the cloud by her phone, which I assumed she already had on…I told her to go ahead and do so. This was a few days ago.

Chaos has ensued since and the texts with her mom are gone. Her phone is, of course, downloading spam texts from 2020 that she deleted forever ago, but it’s deleted all of the texts between she and her mother.

Why in the world would this happen, and what kind of solution might there be for this? I really want to fix this for her, she’s pretty distraught.

 

[joeblack007]

Backups to iCloud contain text messages when iCloud messages is turned off. If your wife had a backup that she can restore to (prior to turning on Messages in iCloud) she should be able to restore those text messages. It would require completely restoring the phone and using the backup during the setup process. If everything is successful, be sure to keep iCloud messages turned off so her backups continue to include any texts. Also make sure there is adequate iCloud storage to keep everything backed up without issues.