Accidentally deleted SMS conversation! Cannot recover - please help!

[jackdlm]

Hi all,

I accidentally deleted a conversation on my Nexus 5 (using the Messenger app instead of Hangouts) and all I want to do is get it back. I've had the phone on airplane mode since I realised what I had done.

I did a bit of research and ended up paying for Wondershare Dr Fone which promised to get my deleted messages back, but no luck. It ends up not connecting to the phone:


The support for this piece of software is offline... so I downloaded a trial of FonePaw Android Data Recovery which seems to have got further in the process but only reaches this:


I did some more research and found out that this software actually requires your phone to be rooted for it to scan for the deleted messages. I looked into rooting as I have never done it before, but saw mixed results about rooting phones and didn't have any reason to trust some of the rooting software.

So now I'm stuck and I thought I'd come to the most popular Android forum as somebody here may have been in a similar situation and will know how to help. If the Wondershare software will work, I'm comfortable rooting my phone if there is a straight forward guide to run me through it, and a bit of reassurance that it won't wipe my phone.

If anybody is able to help then that would be great! I'm losing the will to live...

Thanks!

 

[gone down south]

Try your carrier's website, many now have web access to Sms message

 

[jackdlm]

Try your carrier's website, many now have web access to Sms message

Unfortunately not, they don't share/provide that.

Every piece of software that I try pretty much hints that I need to root my phone? As I said above I'm happy to do this but I'm reading that it wipes data from the phone?

 

[jackdlm]

Has anybody got any ideas? I'm really stuck with this.

 

[Crashdamage]

Even if you root your phone, there's no guarantee you can get the messages back. When deleted, yes, the data still exists. It's in effect just marked as deleted. So for a while recovery is a possibility. But the longer its been and the more the phone has been used since the messages have been deleted, the greater the possibility that the phone has reused that memory space, overwriting the message data.

Once that happens, it's over, no chance of recovery. The space occupied by the message data may not be overwritten for quite a while or it could happen quickly. Impossible to predict.

Bottom line, you could root and give the recovery utilities a try. But if you've used the phone much at all since deleting, I'd say the chances for success are poor.

Android since v1.0. Linux since 2001

 

[jackdlm]

Even if you root your phone, there's no guarantee you can get the messages back. When deleted, yes, the data still exists. It's in effect just marked as deleted. So for a while recovery is a possibility. But the longer its been and the more the phone has been used since the messages have been deleted, the greater the possibility that the phone has reused that memory space, overwriting the message data.

Once that happens, it's over, no chance of recovery. The space occupied by the message data may not be overwritten for quite a while or it could happen quickly. Impossible to predict.

Bottom line, you could root and give the recovery utilities a try. But if you've used the phone much at all since deleting, I'd say the chances for success are poor.

Android since v1.0. Linux since 2001

Thanks for the info. I gave up today. KingRoot wouldn't even work, which is supposed to be able to root "any Android phone". It's a shame that deleting messages don't go into the archive, giving you the chance to restore them if an accident occurs.