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I have never backed up or sync'd my iPhone 4S and need to recover deleted text messages.

Are these stored until they are overwritten? When would the overwriting occur on a 32GB iPhone?

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Are you still looking for an answer to this? – bmike♦ Apr 10 at 14:00

3 Answers

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Text Messages are stored in a Database format, and not as individual files. It's unlikely that they will ever be "overwritten" in the sense you ask, but may well remain in the database tables either forever, or until such regular purge mechanism clears them out on a schedule.

Depending on your OS version, you may be able to open and inspect the files. See this question for more details.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you've backed up your iPhone SMS via iTunes, all of your messages will still be there as of that point.
iPhone SMS Recovery allows users to recover deleted SMS messages from iPhone device and iTunes backup.
Hopefully you do it often and wont lose many of the new ones.
Read More at http://www.transfer-iphone-recovery.com/recover-deleted-sms-from-iphone.html

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The asker starts with "I have never backed up" so your recommendation (as sound as it is) will not really help. – patrix♦ Jan 18 at 10:27
up vote -1 down vote

it is easy to recover deleted SMS from iPhone backup.

There two methods:

  1. You can use iTunes to recover the messages.
  2. You can try iPhone SMS recovery.
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How can deleted SMSs get recovered via iTunes? – patrix♦ Nov 25 '12 at 21:09
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Sally, please review Stack Exchange's product promotion requirements. Quoting: May I promote products or websites I am affiliated with here? [...] you must disclose your affiliation in your answers. – Michael Petrotta Dec 20 '12 at 23:25
This answer is totally wrong. Since the asker has never performed a backup, using a tool that depends on a backup is a waste of their time. Feel free to edit your answer if you feel that a device that already has deleted content will somehow back that deleted content up to iTunes if you connect it after you discover the missing data. – bmike♦ Apr 10 at 13:59

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