How To Recover Deleted Texts on Your Android Phone

Sometimes, you may be distracted or accidentally click a button that you didn’t mean to click, and all of your texts with a friend are deleted. Maybe there was important information in the text that you forgot to write down, or photos that you forgot to save. Whatever the reason, if you act quickly after deleting the texts, then there’s still a chance to retrieve the deleted messages.

In order to recover your deleted messages, you’ll most likely need to download an app that can perform that task. As with downloading any new app, make sure that you’re downloading a well-known app from a reputable source. This will help decrease your chance of downloading a malicious app. After you download an app — especially an app that can access all of your device in order to recover lost files — be sure to run a full virus scan on your phone to make sure that it is free of any malware. Click here to run a full virus scan on your device:

The time that you have to retrieve your deleted text messages differs. You can only retrieve them as long as the memory that they were saved on is still available. Once the memory becomes overwritten by another file or app update, you’ll no longer be able to retrieve your deleted messages. Unfortunately, that memory could be overwritten almost immediately after your texts were deleted.

How to recover old text messages if you still have time to act

In order to retrieve old text messages, you’ll most likely need to have a rooted phone, and you’ll need to download a third-party app. You will not be able to root your phone in a short amount of time, either, so if your phone isn’t rooted before you delete your texts then you’re out of luck.

The solution: Back up your text messages

If you don’t want to worry about deleting your messages again, then you’ll need to regularly back up your texts. You can download a free app from the Play store, like SMS Backup & Restore, to perform this function. With this app, you’ll be able to back up all of your messages to Google Drive, Dropbox, or your email so that you’ll never lose a text. You’ll also be able to restore old text messages (as long as they were backed up), as the name suggests.