How far back and how many deleted texts can be recovered

bear7962 · Sep 15, 2013

I undertood what you were saying, I was just trying to give you the beneifit of my professional experience of getting those type of cases through court to sucessful prosecution.

Renrut · Oct 8, 2013

Just incase anyone else is concerned about this information, or interested in this topic, my case still hasn't came to trial yet. Haven't forgotten about this thread but I will update after the court date.

sutibrl · Apr 11, 2014

Thank you, I found a forums for mobile phones. My problem is, I've accidentally deleted a few official sms-es from my mobile. Few were saved in my handset and the rest in my memory card. Is there any free software to recover them?

Its enough if I even get the ones that were in my memory card. I'd be grateful if anyone helps me out?

Thanks in advance!

robert.ayisi · Apr 18, 2014

These phones are not so different from our PCs. If data deleted from our PCs can be retrieved I assume deleted text messages can be retrieved as well by some software.

Princess08 · May 12, 2016

Police recently took my phone and accessed over 6000 deleted text messages ranging back over 3 years I have been given a print out of these texts from the police as there being used as evidence and also messages sent on what's app to, I had an iPhone, I never thought in a million years they would get what they did. Trust me they can get everything up. My case was a supply class b case which I don't think really matters if they want to get in your phone they will

bear7962 · May 12, 2016

Well, with a warrant, the police can get that info from your cell provider whether it was deleted from your cell or not. The cell phone company keeps your records for quite a while.

Skull One · May 16, 2016

Princess08 said:
Police recently took my phone and accessed over 6000 deleted text messages ranging back over 3 years I have been given a print out of these texts from the police as there being used as evidence and also messages sent on what's app to, I had an iPhone, I never thought in a million years they would get what they did. Trust me they can get everything up. My case was a supply class b case which I don't think really matters if they want to get in your phone they will

IOS uses SQLite for its database manager. The only way they can recover that many text messages is if you made the mistake of not deleting them fairly regularly. So if you decided to only delete them say once every year, and the person you text with a lot has over 2000 text messages deleted, it will take you over 2000 texts to replace the deleted texts with new ones.

Example:

1) Hi
2) What you up to.
3) Not too bad.

You delete #1 and #2. They are simply marked for deletion. Until you send two more texts, they actually wont be replaced. Also you have to take into account that SQLite will not always reuse a deleted record (text) if the data doesn't fit inside that deleted record. So you can also run into an issue where text #1 won't be replaced until you send a single or two character text.

Skull One · May 16, 2016

bear7962 said:
Well, with a warrant, the police can get that info from your cell provider whether it was deleted from your cell or not. The cell phone company keeps your records for quite a while.

You should look up your cell phone provider to find out what they legally say they keep as "records" for SMS and MMS. Keep in mind this does not apply to iMessages which are not stored by the cell phone provider.

And the reason I happen to be on Verizon, their data retention policy for text messages content is three to five days depending on the number of texts you send and receive. Anything past that time frame is only a record that something was sent or received, not the content itself.