iOS 26 Restoring YEARS of deleted messages!

I feel your pain! It took me a couple “days” to sort it- reading, deleting, keeping, one by one and contact by contact. I tried rebooting, signing out and back in, iMessages off and on, and the like. Incoming flood stopped.. but I would caution against switching keeping iMessages from forever to 30 days and back.. the RiSK is real- you could lose all messages prior to the new 30 day threshold, even if toggle for a moment.

My lingering issue is with one favorite contact and the failure to load the imessages entire thread with said contact as it will hang up, showing an endless buffering circle. The ONE workaround for this was to search a keyword (i.e “steps”) to find the photo at the beginning of the thread that I had chosen to keep. FROM THERE it ALL loaded as I can scroll down and use screen record to capture as video, the whole conversation which has nostalgic importance to me. Wish I could offer more. Perhaps recognition of the problem, hard work and adjusted priorities from Apple execs will result in meaningful restoration for users frustrated and at a data loss in this bug.

Thanks for relating your situation and how you were advised in your service call.

From my layman’s perspective, a reset would indeed take you to ground zero as if you just bought a new phone- anything not stored in a backed up or in the cloud would be erased including photos and messages. The setup process would ensue and you'd sign in with your Apple account credentials and so on. Here’s the key 🔑 IF you have cloud storage activated for PHOTOS and IF your cloud storage tier level (basic free 5 gigs storage or paid extra?) is sufficient to warehouse copies of all the photos, then you would restore these to your device when you sign back into iCloud with your “new” phone that’s been reset. That’s a big IF. Make sure you 1. Check your storage availability situation and 2. Make sure all your current photos have been uploaded to the cloud storage BEFORE you venture out into reset land.

Be aware also, your iMessages might be loaded with various photos shared within dialogues with various contacts. Have any of those been saved to your photos first before you sync to the cloud? These are some key considerations you should explore before making your decision to reset! YouTube can be a helpful resource for walk thrus on understanding this stuff a bit better. Hope this helps!

Glad you got results and shared your experience, trying to find resolution. As I suspect it is a bug, I’m afraid to pull the trigger on that experiment because as I understand it, when you switch to 30 days, it immediately begins permanently deleting older messages not in compliance with the revised setting and it’s not clear to me if switching back will signal a restore unless that is part of a glitch too. I’m afraid it’s a bold and adventurous move better suited to a digital gunslinger willing to showdown against the iOS and risk it all- something I can’t afford to lose.

Now In my case, it’s old and current conversations thousands of lines deep each, where I had previously deleted parts of the thread manually but kept the best parts while individually deleting each line I deemed insignificant to save space.. Now I have to go back thru these and rinse and repeat.. and I’m still at it days later uggh..

Further still, some of these messages will hang up trying to load a page to scroll and will only temporarily “release” the next screen/“page” of messages if I A. Delete a text nearest the page attempting to load or B. Use search to find a picture or matching word higher up in the thread.

I cannot get past the stuck loading any other way currently… There’s my flare..

Thanks everybody!

Good question! We’re here sharing observations and some offer that as a possible workaround. I call it the “gunslinger” protocol because the RISK is real- you could end up losing everything past 30 days, as some have reported. Do you have nostalgia in those messages? Maybe find a way to back them up with screenshots or an app that might exist to stitch message thread screenshots.

At the very least, the easiest way (time and space consuming) to get an alternative backup is do a screen recording of scrolling through the text threads you want to keep. You can do this with some moderate speed as you can always play the video back slower or with pauses to read everything later. Test it out first, see if it’s viable. 👍🏼

This has caused no small distress for many. New IOS rollouts take time to iron out and with some quality work, perhaps you can be restored down the line. The thing is, we KNOW those messages are still on a server and apparently have been for years after deletion..

Here’s a tip moving forward: you can always utilize the screen recording feature to capture video of scrolling through your VIP messages you need an extra backup of.

~Hurt but Hopeful

Cheers!

I understood that the oldest phone “worthy” of the iOS 26 update was the 11, which I’m still content with. If you’ve managed to hang on to the 7 comfortably that’s great but I have to conclude that you were updating to the latest version of 18, unless somehow you’re the lucky winner of a very rare glitch that erroneously let you proceed to 26. If so, then who knows what kind of adventurous (or dangerous) technology safari awaits you. Technical support should be more responsive or catch on to this?

What I find interesting is that the more likely scenario (you’re talking about issues with iOS 18) is that the SAME iMessages error is happening to you in THAT 18 context, which suggests a carryover of a problem that has been neglected much longer than we knew. ..And yet mums the word from Apple about this? Apple “pie” used to be, among other things, pretty tasty. Now it’s beginning to sour quickly. Let’s hope they take these issues seriously, act decisively, and hopefully show some transparency. Patience from us comes easier when a company acknowledges the problem in this way. Hang in there!

Everything was going smooth..until it wasn’t. I’m sorry to hear I’m in fact not alone in this area. It seems a persistent bug might be effecting the lot of the messages code .. that’s a disheartening possibility, especially when in reverse as for you, losing messages. Here’s some key questions:

Are you the original phone owner?

I’m the only owner of my phone, purchased new (11).

Has your phone been restored from a backup ever?

Did you, like me, install iOS 18.7 first and then iOS 26 right after (*because you didn’t see the iOS 26 small banner at the bottom first?)

Why was iOS 26 so subtle and almost hidden from view compared to the prominence of iOS 18.7 on the update screen?

If it was to fill up more system data space and slow devices, mission success. :(