Missing Messages

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the cross-post, but this didn't get any attention in the iOS 10 forum.

I've been searching for a solution to this problem for a while now, and I'm hoping someone here can help me out.

For reference, I'm using iOS 10.2.1 on an iPhone 6.

The other night I was on a FaceTime call when we started having connection issues. First the calls kept dropping, then we were having trouble sending texts. My phone was plugged in to charge at the time. Suddenly, with the call still connected and transmitting video from my phone to the other person, my screen changed to the white apple logo and progress bar on a black background that you would see at the end of a software update. During that time the audio still worked fine for both of us, and my video was fine on the other end of the call. When the progress bar was finished "loading," the screen went back to normal and I could see the other person on the call on my screen again.

Things seemed normal after that, but when the call ended I went to check my text messages. Other than those sent while trying to wrangle the connection issues, everything was gone.

I've seen all my messages disappear in the past, but some combination of resetting the Messages app or the phone usually brings them back. However, it was always ALL of the messages that would disappear. This time, they're all gone except for the conversations that have happened since that call, and there is no past history associated with any of those messages despite several years' worth of history that had been on my phone up to that point. My phone still shows that the messages are on the hard drive (3.71 GB of data), and the messages appear in spotlight search results, but if I tap on them the Messages app opens to the list of conversations instead of opening the message itself.

Based on what little I know about the way ios handles messages, it seems the index for the database was corrupted. Is there any way to get my messages back? It was late at night when this happened, so I put the phone down and decided I would deal with it in the morning, not realizing my phone would do an automatic iCloud backup. Now I'm hesitant to try and restore from a backup because I don't want to overwrite data that I could otherwise recover only to find out the most recent backup doesn't have the message data in it.

If anyone has some insight into this, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!