Many people who purchase Decipher TextMessage use it to recover deleted messages. When we say "deleted messages" here, we mean messages that were received and deleted between backups, so that there is no record of the message in a backup.
If you have backed-up your device prior to when the text was deleted, you can also use Decipher TextMessage to read the texts in that backup to recover it.
But, the iTunes backup schedule doesn't always nicely coincide with the schedule of our accidents, our fits, or children playing with our phone. When we get those emails, it tugs at our hearts because we know that you wouldn't be writing if that text wasn't important, and it feels awful having lost it possibly forever. Decipher TextMessage can probably help you recover the deleted texts -- we wanted to explain why some of your deleted texts may not be totally gone, and how you can go and look for them.
If you have backed-up your device prior to when the text was deleted, you can also use Decipher TextMessage to read the texts in that backup to recover it.
But, the iTunes backup schedule doesn't always nicely coincide with the schedule of our accidents, our fits, or children playing with our phone. When we get those emails, it tugs at our hearts because we know that you wouldn't be writing if that text wasn't important, and it feels awful having lost it possibly forever. Decipher TextMessage can probably help you recover the deleted texts -- we wanted to explain why some of your deleted texts may not be totally gone, and how you can go and look for them.
Why your deleted texts may still be around
The iPhone OS stores your texts in a database system called sqlite. This is relevant because of the way that sqlite handles deleting entries in the database. When you delete an entry (aka a text), rather than totally obliterating the entry in the database, the entry is just marked as no longer in use, and will be reused later. Eventually the deleted entries are moved around and the space is reused, but before that happens, we can look at that space to view the deleted text messages.
Sidenote: Many people I've talked to assume that the space in the database is reused in a "first come first served" manner -- that recently-deleted texts are always findable and very old ones are always not. This isn't always the case, and we encourage you to use our free trial of Decipher TextMessage to explore what messages are available for you.
Sidenote: Many people I've talked to assume that the space in the database is reused in a "first come first served" manner -- that recently-deleted texts are always findable and very old ones are always not. This isn't always the case, and we encourage you to use our free trial of Decipher TextMessage to explore what messages are available for you.
Looking at all of the messages, including the "deleted" ones
Decipher TextMessage will look in your iTunes backups folder to find your backups and extract the text messages and attachments. I always encourage customers to run Decipher TextMessage once before fuddling with making a new backup, just in case the messages they want happen to be in the previous backup. (iTunes overwrites the previous backup when you make a new one. Annoying for our purposes, but good for your hard-drive space!)
The main window of Decipher TextMessage contains the history of NOT deleted messages that were found in your various iPhone backups, organized by phone and contact. You may want to poke around in there for a while to make sure that the messages you're looking for aren't sitting in plain sight from a previous backup :)
From here, I recommend making a new iPhone backup, especially if you don't see your iPhone, or your backup is too old. Then, close and rerun Decipher TextMessage, so that it can read in all of your new backup.
Now select your device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) in the main window and press the "Recover" button. Decipher TextMessage will scan through all of your text-message databases for that phone, and present you with a summary page that you can use to sift through deleted messages and hopefully find what you're looking for. We highly recommend using the search to filter for what you're looking for, especially if you have a lot of messages -- sometimes the message data is incomplete (such as a missing timestamp) so the message may not always be in that first set in the list.
Note: The summary page for viewing your deleted iPhone text messages is a temporary file that lives on your computer. The file is deleted after you close Decipher TextMessage, and your data is NEVER uploaded to our servers (or any server) for that matter. Your privacy matters to us -- all of your data is your data and yours only!
How can I recover deleted image and video attachments from my iPhone text messages?
As the title promises, sometimes you can find the attachments from text messages that you've erased also. When you delete a message in the Messages app, all of the underlying attachments for that message (the photo or video, along with the speech bubble preview of it) should be deleted automatically. One thing I've learned in my years of iPhone forensics: "should be deleted automatically" usually means "eh, maybe about half the time deleted automatically."
In the next update to Decipher TextMessage, our summary page will also include a section showing all of these deleted (but not really deleted) attachments, so that you can skim through them and save any you wish to save.
If like me, you end up seeing that you have 5GB of deleted (but not really deleted) text videos and photos, you'll also be happy to know that we have a new Decipher Tool in development that will help you purge all of these from your phone! Interested? Send us an email and let us know. Nothing makes me work faster than knowing that people want to use our software :) (You don't have to write us a fancy note -- "I want to purge my deleted attachments" will get the point across for us!)
Kelly Wilkerson
Kelly Wilkerson
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