SMS deleted after 5 years - how to stop it and recover them?

Spoonmatic

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Hi all, new here. I have an S21 running Android 12. I use the default Samsung SMS app. I migrated a long history of SMS to it when new, so it has messages going back well before it was made. I was scrolling back just now and discovered that the oldest message I can reach is exactly 5 years old today and I think there should be previous messages, so it seems something is set up to delete or hide them automatically. Half an hour of Googling and poking around and I still can't find it.

a) Is there some functionality for deleting SMS automatically at 5 years?
b) What is the community's preferred / recommended recovery tool for the missing stuff if there is one?
c) If I power up the previous phone from which the history was migrated, which should have the old messages present, is it likely to do the same. Can I prevent that happening?

Thanks in advance
 

Spoonmatic

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OK, I think the 5-year thing is a red herring. I just found a few older messages from April 2017 so it was a pure coincidence. It looks like the old phone was doing the auto deleting but some threads made it across from the backup phone.

That means I might want to see whether the old messages on the old phone can be recovered, so still interested in recommendations for a tool for that.
 

B. Diddy

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Welcome to Android Central! in the Samsung Messages settings, under More Settings, is Delete Old Messages toggled on?
 

B. Diddy

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Are you using the Samsung Messages app, or the Google Messages app? I know that Samsung started using Google Messages as their default, but I'm not sure if that was the case for the S21. The Samsung Messages icon has 3 dots in a speech bubble, while the Google Messages icon has 3 lines.
 

Spoonmatic

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The app I am using has three dots not in a speech bubble. Version info: messages.android_20220419_01_RC01.phone_samsung_dynamic
I am up to my eyeballs at work but later on I will have proof whether it is deleting stuff because we'll pass the date of another old message. TBH I don't think it is, looks like a pure coincidence that multiple threads had a last message exactly five years earlier, possibly because auto-deletion in the old phone stopped at that point.
 

Spoonmatic

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OK, it seems this phone is not deleting messages, but one of the phones I imported content from had been doing that until stopped some time before the import. By pure coincidence, the last messages that had been deleted were exactly 5 years and one day old when I was searching the other day.

So now what I need to do is dig out and fire up the old phone and try to recover the deleted messages there. Thanks for your help so far, I will probably be back once I have the old phone ready.