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MacKenzie999

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Hello…I’m just wondering if there’s any way to retrieve iMessages from 2-3 years ago. I have made occasional backups of my iPhone but I’m not sure how to proceed from there or if that’s even the answer.
 
I asked this of myself. With iOS 16 I see you can now retrieve deleted messages from the app but they will be gone permanently after 40 days.
I wanted messages a year old and I understand even with regular back ups, they’re gone forever. I got that info via Google searches iPhone messages specifically.
I looked into these lost data retrieval software specialists but I couldn’t find one capable although I did retrieve some very old email addresses, photos, music, word and excel documents which I thought I’d lost preTimeMachine.
 
If you have set your Messages to be kept permanently (this is a setting on your iPhone), they should still be there. If you have set your iPhone to keep messages for 1 year or 30 days, they are gone. I'm not aware of a method to recover the messages from backups.
 
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