How To Find Old Text Messages On Mac

Oh no! You've accidentally smashed delete on your Mac, and your iMessages have disappeared from the earth. That's your entire life vanished – everything including the texts from your Gran, work documents, holiday videos, and the saucy snaps from your lover.

Because iMessage is about more than just letters or notes- it'southward a completely secure communications and storage platform – 1 which yous trust with your life.

And information technology gets worse – although iMessage does accept deject backup and sync – this works against yous as the iMessages you've wiped from i device are automatically scrubbed from everywhere else, too.

Take a deep jiff, calm down, brand yourself a nice cup of tea, and we'll tell yous how you tin can recover iMessages on a Mac.

Where should your iMessages exist?

By default, your Mac stores iMessages in ~/Library/Message.

You lot are searching for folders called:

Attachment;
Archive;
CloudKitMetaData;
A file called "conversation.db".

Nether platonic circumstances, your iMessages should be on every apple device you lot own. They're on your MacBook, your iPad, your iPhone, on any other device you lot own which begins with "i" and they're stored in encrypted form on Apple tree's servers (actually Amazon, but never mind that correct at present) in the cloud.

This level of back-up means that losing one or more of your devices isn't a complete disaster – your iMessages will all the same be available to y'all on your secondary Apple tree devices and tin exist restored from the cloud. This is not the case if you accidentally delete your iMessages while continued to a network. The control will ripple out and scrub them from everywhere.

Lost a week'due south worth of iMessages and don't know why – they were there a few hours ago. Please help me. How can I restore individual bulletin threads?! Some of those message threads are 5 years one-time 🙁

— v i o l e t (@IAmVioletSkies) January 22, 2021

If your iMessages disappeared from your Mac – as in, if they're non showing upwardly in the iMessage app, your first step should exist to check if they're physically notwithstanding on the deejay.

Exactly where they'll be depends on which version of macOS you're using.

Open up up finder and navigate to ~/Library/Bulletin. You'll be looking for folders called "Zipper", "Archive", and "CloudKitMetaData", and a file chosen "chat.db".
If y'all can see them, so your messages are (probably) intact and you should copy them to a USB stick or an external bulldoze. Well done!

If you're rocking a later version of macOS, there's a take a chance that your iMessages oasis't been saved to the hd at all, as Apple is leaning more and more than towards a deject-only approach.

You can bank check whether or not your Mac is configured to save iMessages locally past opening "Preferences" and looking at whether the "Salve history when conversations are closed" option is agile.

In the unfortunate issue that y'all are on a later version of macOS and haven't set the option to save locally, well so. It sucks to be you lot. Just kidding – in that location'southward still a non-aught chance that your iMessages may be saved as temporary files on your hard disk.

Exercise non plow off your machine or use it until you take some disk recovery software set to go.

But my iMessages aren't anywhere on my Mac

To be honest, we didn't think they would exist, it was an unlikely and a long shot, just it'south always worth trying the simplest things first.

At present fight downwards those rising waves of panic and we'll sort this. Don't worry.

And you can cease wishing for a time machine to get dorsum and recover iMessages on your Mac considering Apple tree has thoughtfully included a fully functional temporal transporter with every desktop operating system since Mac Bone X 10.5 Leopard.

Sadly, Time Car is an incremental backup utility and will non transport you dorsum to earlier you accidentally deleted your iMessages then that yous can prevent yourself from doing so. Steve Jobs was enlightened of potentially catastrophic nature of temporal paradoxes and commented out the code which would allow users to create them.

If you've recently made a Time Machine fill-in of your Mac, read on, otherwise skip ahead to the next method.

Hither'southward how you restore your iMessages with Time Machine…

Shut down the iMessage app completely, and make sure information technology'southward non running in the background.
Open the Time Machine app, and using the finder tool, look for the files and folders we mentioned previously. These are named "chat.db". These are folders called "Attachment", "Archive", and "CloudKitMetaData", and a file called "chat.db". Brand certain that they were created as recently as possible – but before you accidentally deleted your iMessages.
These files contain everything yous need to get up and running again, so just hit "Restore", and your missing iMessages will exist back in the app.

Information technology'southward that simple.

What virtually the copies on my iPhone or iPad

So you've accidentally deleted your iMessages from your desktop only they're still present on your portable devices – goddamn you're lucky. Kill the network connexion, quick! Plow off WiFi, popular the SIM. Practice any you have to practise, considering one time your iPhone or iPad recieves the signal that those iMessages are supposed to exist gone, those iMessages are… gone.

Retrieving them is fairly like shooting fish in a barrel:

Connect your device to your desktop Mac with a data cable – cheap charging cables won't work hither. Information technology's e'er best to go with Apple's original.
Launch Finder past clicking on its Dock icon, or past invoking Spotlight (printing the command fundamental and tap the space bar) and typing "Finder".
Select your iPhone or iPad from the list of available locations in the left pane.
Make sure the "Dorsum up all the information on your iPhone [or iPad] to this Mac" option located in the Backups section of the General tab is selected.
Click "Support Now" to create a local backup of your iMessages.

Yet no luck?

OK, We'll level with you here, all the options we've discussed so far have been sort of long shots. Apple tree has been in the tech concern since the 1970s and makes quality hardware and software.

For your iMessages to have survived on whatever device after you lot mistakenly told your mac to delete them, would require a colossal corporeality of luck, a network outage, or a device left overlooked in a WiFi dead zone down in the basement.

Likewise, the odds are stacked against you having a Fourth dimension Machine fill-in contempo enough for all of your iMessages to be up-to-appointment, only not so contempo that they've already vanished.

If yous've read this far downward and tried what we've suggested, you'll just take to face up it – your iMessages are gone from everywhere. Just there'due south a departure between gone and gone, and but considering they are gone, doesn't mean they're gone for good. And no – your deleted iMessages won't be in the recycling bin.

Y'all demand Disk Recovery Software

Computers are weird. Think of your hard bulldoze every bit a warehouse full of wooden crates – kind of like in the end scene of Indian Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. When your operating system creates a file, it puts it in one of these boxes amidst millions of other boxes, and then information technology notes downward the location of the box, in case you ever need that file once again. Information technology puts a sticker on the box to brand sure nothing else gets put in there by mistake and ruins the contents.

When you make up one's mind you want to delete the file considering honestly, the Spice Girls aren't your thing anymore, and having their entire discography taking upwards difficult drive space is embarrassing, your OS won't simply toss the contents into the nearest landfill to be devoured by worms. It will just mark the box as unoccupied, and strike out whatever mention of "Wannabe" from its ledgers.

Your 90s girl band hits are all the same in their crate, but information technology's now unmarked and in that location'due south no way in hell you'll exist able to notice them. There'south a very existent danger that something else will exist put in the box and Geri Halliwell'due south ginger wig will exist gone for skillful.

Did yous similar that illustration? We thought it was fab. No. At that place isn't a real warehouse – it's a shiny slice of tech either on your lap or your desk.

Back to the real world, and this is where Disk Drill iOS Recovery comes in. Because your iMessages are still physically on the disk, the specialist software can inspect each individual box and check what's inside. It doesn't demand a map or an index, or even a marking on the box showing that information technology is or was occupied.

When Deejay Drill has located recently deleted files, users can preview the contents and then recover them to a safe location. No drama.

Hither's how to recover your deleted iMessages:

Download Disk Drill from the Cleverfiles website.
Install the app by dragging the Disk Drill icon to the Applications folder.
Launch the app. Your Mac may give you lot a warning that Deejay Drill is an awarding downloaded from the internet, and ask for confirmation. You should click "Open".
The deejay drill interface will show all drives connected to your Mac, and the ane you desire should be labelled "Macintosh HD".
Select "Macintosh HD" in the center pane.
In the recovery panel on the right of the screen, hit "Search for lost data".
Go and brand a nice cup of tea while deejay drill performs its magic.
On your return, y'all'll come across that the browse is finished and Disk Drill will present you with a categorized listing of files which can be recovered.
Review the files to find your deleted iMessages and check the checkboxes to mark them for recovery.
Printing "Recover" to accept Disk Drill recover them to a safe location.
Done.

Disk recovery software has been effectually for decades and at that place are a lot of options out there. We like Disk Drill particularly because it's up to date, has a clean interface and is capable of dealing with unlike file systems. It also has a proven record of successful recoveries and is priced at but $89 for the PRO version.

Jeff Cochin is a information management and recovery professional who has been with Handy Recovery for several years at present. Jeff'due south experience spans many It-related fields, including data analysis and digital marketing.

Andrey Vasilyev is an Editorial Counselor for Handy Recovery. Andrey is a software engineer expert with extensive expertise in data recovery, figurer forensics, and information litigation. Andrey brings over 12 years of experience in software evolution, database assistants, and hardware repair to the team.