Lost years of messages because of typo

[firehat]

My iPad is running iPadOS 16 and isn't managing storage well. I needed to clear up a chunk and the biggest slice was messages. Messages (nite the setting is not under iCloud) was set to keep everything forever. I changed it to 30 days and it warned me it would delete things older on my DEVICE. turns out that's an iCloud setting and it nuked my iPhone's copies too. I've lost years of messages that I really wanted to keep, including message traffic during the week my son was born and my wife was in the hospital and threads with late friends.

I am livid and upset. I posted this in iOS because the consequences are on my phone. Does anyone know of any way to retrieve these? They aren't in recently deleted and iCloud doesn't have an obvious folder.

 

[adrianlondon]

Is there anything in the new "Recently Deleted" folder? I don't have an iPad but on the phone you click "Filters" top-left to see it.

Note that if you have messages sync'd to iCloud then it will delete across devices (as you've just discovered!). The warning message you get when you change the "Keep" setting is wrong. That's bad. I'll log a Feedback thingy.

 

[russell_314]

I don’t think there’s a way to recover something deleted on iCloud.

Maybe if you have a Mac or other device that’s not connected to the Internet, it still might be on there but as soon as that device connects to the Internet it’s going to sync.

 

[ManuCH]

Contact Apple support. I've heard that they are able to restore your whole iCloud to a previous state of a certain day. They only do that in serious cases where you lose all your photos or messages, but they seem to be able to do it. Don't lose time though, as I have no idea for how long they keep those backups.

 

[firehat]

Apple support says they can't restore the messages alone. I'd have to reset to factory settings and restore from a backup

 

[ghostface147]

Apple support says they can't restore the messages alone. I'd have to reset to factory settings and restore from a backup

That's the only course of action here. Hopefully you have an older backup.

 

[golfnut1982]

do you have a MacBook and use iMessage or have an iPad backup? if you do, then you should have a copy of the messages saved in the Mac iMessage database and in the iPad backup. for this to work though, the messages app cannot be synced to the cloud though on your Mac and iPad, basically saved locally - like you said iPad was until recently. if it was saved in iCloud they were nuked there too (which you confirmed happened). there is a way to get them back if you do from your Mac or your iPad backup. if you have that, then you can restore them from you Mac or iPad. once restored, then switch to messages in iCloud - they should then sync everywhere again. but remember to not sync all sources to the cloud.